A time for trusting

Whether it’s in long lines at the grocery store or theme park or staring down the weeks left on the calendar until a much-needed vacation, waiting never excites us. Sometimes our waiting cuts even deeper—such as waiting for medical test results, another life stage, or reuniting with a loved one.

In Waiting Isn’t a Waste: The Surprising Comfort of Trusting God in the Uncertainties of Life (Crossway 2024), Mark Vroegop says that everyone faces “tension-filled gaps” that “present an opportunity for faith.” Vroegop, a pastor, looks at waiting from a decidedly spiritual lens, but he doesn’t sugarcoat it or douse it in religious language. “Let’s start with something obvious,” he writes at the beginning of the first chapter, “waiting is hard.”

All too often, Vroegop says, we waste our waiting. But waiting in a Biblical way “creates an invitation to more spiritual maturity and godliness.”

Appendices at the end of the book recommend Bible verses to focus on while waiting and provide a chart for building our faith now by reminding ourselves how God has led us in our past.

While it may seem natural to think of waiting as a passive activity, Vroegop makes it clear that Christians should be busy while they wait. Biblical waiting, he argues, is less like “watching a baseball game” and “more like a guard scanning the horizon.”

As we watch for what God will do and how He will work good for us through our own gap times, we take our eyes off ourselves and reorient our focus toward Christ.

Vroegop shares a practical blueprint for dealing with waiting, taking four action steps from Psalm 25: focus, adore, seek, and trust. “Waiting on God is living on what I know to be true about God when I don’t know what’s true about my life,” he says. When we wait like this, we trust God to “fill the spaces” of those gaps we all experience.

“God works as I wait,” Vroegop writes. Our waiting reminds us of our lack of control, pushing us again to place our trust in God.

Next time we wait in line at the grocery store or on hold with the doctor’s office, our “waiting reveals what we believe about ourselves and about God.”

At some point, all of us have to wait—for now. One day, all our waiting will be over, Vroegop writes, and the God who worked in and through all our gap spaces will welcome us home.