As a child, I despised the words “just wait.”

Even into adulthood, I find that patience is the thing that I struggle with the most. Whether it’s waiting for a bus that is perpetually late or for God to reveal the next step, the desire seems to always be the same: I just want to move.

Our society praises forward movement. It’s always more comfortable to share that we have plans for our life or that we have some semblance of what direction we’re heading in. 

But what about when we aren’t moving forward, or we’re not sure when we’re going to move forward? Or even what “going forward” looks like? The big question then becomes this: What do I do in the meantime?

I’ve come to see that for most of my life, I’ve been waiting: waiting to go from one grade to the next, waiting to get the next job, or even waiting for my primary vocation to be revealed. When I look deeper at this need to resolve the tension of waiting, restlessness stares back at me. The valley of “in the meantime” can be a very isolating and scary thing. 

I currently find myself in a season of waiting. I entered religious life over a year ago believing that this was THE next step to take. At the time, God’s invitation to me felt very clear: This is where God wanted me. As the months passed, God slowly started to change my plans. I waited years to enter, and suddenly God was asking me to wait again as He gently shifted my life in a new direction: to follow Him in a new way and leave this life behind. 

As I left religious life, I felt the whole spectrum of human emotions: joy and grief, excitement and fear, peace mixed up in moments of panic. But above all, I kept asking God why: Why not skip over the messy parts and just cut to the good part? Why not just help me get to where I’m supposed to be? 

The uncomfortable feeling of being in between things and the simple fact of not knowing what comes next left me scared with no sense of control. And yet, God wanted me to relinquish the control back to Him.

There have been moments where I pined for what was, and also desired so badly for God to hit fast forward. But this invitation to live in the present moment with Him helped me to see how He is continually moving, even if I don’t feel like I am.

On good days, it really does feel like He has my back: a lead opens up for a new job, new opportunities arise, or I have solid conversations with family or friends that give me more clarity. At other times, I feel like I’m completely abandoned, crying out to God and hearing nothing in return.

The tension that this creates—feeling like God is both close and distant all at once—is precisely where I have learned that God is found. 

As I’ve prayed with these valleys of waiting, I’ve felt God remind me again and again that I am never waiting alone. While God holds all of my life in His hands, He continually invites me to focus on the present with Him.

I used to think that God only wanted to hear when I was grateful or joyful. But to live in the present moment is to also give Him permission to hold me in those moments where I am anything but grateful or joyful.

This is the God who sits with us in our waiting. Psalm 139 describes Him as “the inescapable God”, the God who is acquainted with all our ways and knows what we want to say even before we say it. He wants to be right there with us, celebrating our mountaintop moments and crying with us in the dark valleys. God’s invitation to live in the present moment is not just something for our sake, but an opportunity to invite God into the present with us. To God, it doesn’t matter if the present is a polished product or a complete mess: He desires nothing more than to be with us.

Someone very dear to me said to me recently that there is holiness in the waiting. 

When we look over the course of history at the many holy men and women who have walked before us, we can see the various ways God has called ordinary people into unique circumstances—all with the purpose of growing in a deeper relationship with them. A beautiful example is Abraham and Sarah, two prominent Old Testament figures. God promised Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky or sands on the seashore, and yet, Sarah ended up having their son Isaac at 99 years old! 

As Abraham and Sarah prepared for God to fulfill the promises He made to them, I can only imagine the difficulty and pain that came with waiting. What’s more, it must have been humiliating for a woman of Sarah’s age to still be childless in this particular historical period. The call to holiness in the waiting—whether in this scenario or other ones that you might find yourself in, can sometimes be a slow burn: one that is painful and sometimes too hot to touch. The pain that is associated with waiting can be the thing that pushes us to resolve that tension: we rush into something because we want to arrive at a place that isn’t waiting.

In these moments, it’s okay to let God know how we’re feeling; in fact, He wants us to come to Him in our discomfort and pain. I think that as much as He desires to fulfill His promises to us, He just as much wants us as close as possible. 

It has been my experience that God uses the waiting to prepare me for where He’s leading. In each of those times, and especially now, He has surprised me in ways that I could have never seen coming—indeed, He’s kept me on the edge of my seat, walking into plot twists that are beyond my own imagination.

While the waiting always seems slow and tedious, when God wants to move, He moves. Though we may not see it at the moment, He wants to love us and will give us the graces necessary to move and wait with Him. Like Abraham and Sarah, the pause that you may find yourself in may be self-imposed, or maybe it was imposed on you. In both scenarios, God is waiting for you there.