Waiting Rooms and the Will of God

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Right now I have a to-do list. I have deadlines. I am ready to work. And instead, I am waiting.

Wait in traffic. Wait in the waiting room. Wait in the exam room. Wait in the pre-op room. Wait in the operating room. Wait. Wait. Wait.

I am heading into surgery, and every step of this process has forced me into the one posture I fight hardest to avoid: doing nothing while someone else is in control.

If you have ever sat in a hospital hallway, a courtroom lobby, or a parking lot waiting for a phone call that will change everything, you already know what I am talking about. Waiting does not cost you much energy. But it costs you something far more valuable. It costs you the illusion that you are the one running your life.

Why Waiting Feels Like an Attack on Your Manhood

Here is what I have discovered about myself in this season. I do not actually mind hard work. I do not mind sacrifice. What I mind is waiting, because waiting means I am not in control. It means I am dependent on someone or something else. It means my personal agency, the thing I lean on most, is gone.

Most men manage this feeling the same way I do. We stay busy. We keep a long to-do list. We keep many irons in the fire. Busyness gives us the feeling of control, and it conveniently keeps our minds and hearts too occupied to sit still with Scripture, too occupied to examine our relationship with God, too occupied to listen for His voice.

Take away the to-do list, though, and put a man in a waiting room with nothing to do and nothing to fix, and you will find out fast what he actually depends on. For years I depended on busyness. This week, busyness was taken off the table.

The Strength Hidden Inside Weakness

When I could not escape the waiting, I kept coming back to Isaiah 40:28-31. Read it slowly.

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.
(Isaiah 40:28-31, ESV)

Notice what the prophet does not say. He does not say the strong get stronger by trying harder. He says youths, the strongest and most capable men in any room, will faint and fall exhausted. Your strength, my strength, has a ceiling. It always has.

Then notice the promise attached to waiting. Not to hustling. Not to gritting your teeth and pushing through. To waiting. “They who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength.” Waiting is not the empty space between real spiritual activity. Waiting for the Lord is the exchange point where your exhausted strength is traded for His unfailing strength.

That is exactly what I need right now. Not motivation. Strength I do not currently have.

Be Still and Know

There is a second passage that has been sitting with me just as heavily.

Be still, and know that I am God.
(Psalm 46:10, ESV)

“Be still” is not a suggestion to relax. It is a command to stop. Stop striving. Stop managing. Stop trying to hold the outcome together with your own hands. The command is aimed directly at the part of you that believes if you just stay busy enough, alert enough, and in control enough, you can secure the results you want.

Being still is how you make room to actually know that God is God, and you are not. In the operating room, I have no skill to guide the surgeon’s hands. I cannot direct the nurses. I cannot control how my body responds to anesthesia or how recovery unfolds in the weeks after. Every one of those facts used to terrify me. Now I am learning to let them press me toward stillness instead of panic, because the God who is still God in that room was still God long before I got there.

Learning Dependence Without Shame

Here is the specific list of dependence I am walking into, and I am naming it plainly because I think a lot of men need permission to name theirs too.

• Dependence on doctors I have no skill to guide or direct.
• Dependence on nurses and nursing staff to keep me alive and start me on the road to recovery.
• Dependence on family and friends to do for me what I have always unthinkingly done for myself. Getting dressed. Lifting anything over five pounds. Driving.
• Dependence on God to guard my mind and my emotions through a season full of danger, limitation, and physical weakness.

None of that is comfortable to write. Somewhere along the way, most of us absorbed the idea that a real man does not need help, and if he does, he certainly does not talk about it. But Scripture does not treat dependence as a defect in a man’s character. It treats dependence on God as the whole point.

Paul learned this the hard way, through a physical weakness he begged God to remove.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
(2 Corinthians 12:9-10, ESV)

Paul does not grit his teeth through his weakness. He boasts in it, because his weakness is precisely the place where Christ’s power shows up. Your unfinished to-do list, your dependence on a surgeon’s hands, your inability to control the outcome, none of that disqualifies you from strength. It is the doorway to it.

A Prayer of Surrender

This is where I keep landing, and I offer it to you as my own prayer, not a tidy conclusion I have already mastered.

Teach me to wait for You.

Teach me to be still and know that You are God.

Teach me to gratefully depend on You for my next breath.

Teach me to be patient with physical infirmity.

Teach me to get out of the way so that Your grace, mercy, and peace can shine on me, and through me, to everyone on my medical and recovery team.

Teach me Your sovereignty, my Lord and my God, and ignite in me a delight to surrender to You.

What This Means for You Today

You may not be facing surgery. Your waiting room might look like a job search, a struggling marriage, a diagnosis, a financial mess, or a prodigal child you cannot fix no matter how hard you try. Wherever your waiting room is, the invitation is the same.

Stop managing it for the next five minutes. Open Isaiah 40:28-31 and Psalm 46:10. Read them slowly, out loud if you can. Name out loud, to God, exactly what you are currently dependent on and exactly what you cannot control. Then ask Him, honestly, to teach you to wait.

Do not fill the silence with one more task today. Sit in it, and let Him renew your strength.