I first prayed this prayer four years ago. I know the exact date because I scribbled it in the corner of an old notebook. Last spring, while looking for a phone charger, I found the notebook again. The request is still the same. The wording hasn’t changed much.
Honestly, neither has anything else. If you searched why is God making me wait so long tonight, I won’t pretend I’ve solved the question and am calling back from some comfortable porch on the other side. I’m close by, in the same darkness, holding the same notebook.
The question no one really wants you to say aloud
Waiting has an acceptable church version. Tell a room of Christians, “I’m waiting on God,” and you’ll get warm, approving nods. The phrase sounds patient and faintly sacred. The honest version is harder to say. It sounds more like this: I asked you for one thing. Just one. Years have passed, and now I’m beginning to wonder whether you aren’t there at all—or whether you are there but have chosen not to answer me. Say that, and someone may put a worried hand on your shoulder. A book recommendation might come next. Yet that sentence may be closer to real faith than the respectable version. You don’t become that furious with someone unless some part of you still believes they’re there.
How waiting feels when you’re the one stuck inside it
The strange thing is that waiting rarely looks dramatic. No one tells you how much of the pain comes from plain monotony. Tuesday arrives, followed by another Tuesday. At 4:12pm, muscle memory makes you refresh your email even though you already know what won’t be there. Then someone you don’t particularly like receives exactly what you’ve been asking for, and you reply, “so happy for you!!” Two exclamation marks, because one would reveal too much. Eventually, you stop mentioning it to your friends. Their sympathetic expression has become exhausting.
People also rarely talk about the dull, persistent shame. At some point, you start wondering whether the delay is because of you. Maybe everyone else received an answer because they prayed the right way or had stronger faith. Perhaps a better version of you would already have heard yes. I’ve lost entire nights to that thought. For the record, it isn’t true. At 2am, though, it can sound remarkably convincing.
What people tell you during a long wait, ranked by usefulness
To be fair, nearly everyone who uses these lines means well. They aren’t bad people. Your pain makes them uneasy, so they reach for the nearest familiar sentence.
| Their words | The effect they have |
|---|---|
| “God’s timing is perfect.” | It may be true. Still, it feels like a door shutting. Instead of beginning a conversation, it ends one. |
| “Everything happens for a reason.” | It recasts your suffering as a device in somebody’s plot. No one wants that role. |
| “Have you tried praying about it?” | An honestly astonishing thing to ask when someone is four years in. |
| “Maybe God’s protecting you from something.” | There are times when this helps. At others, it means, “Your hurt is making me uncomfortable, so please feel better.” |
| “That’s really hard. I don’t get it either.” | This is the helpful one. Almost no one thinks to say it. |
If you know someone caught in a long wait, that final response costs nothing. Feel free to use it.
Scripture is much angrier about waiting than most churches are
It’s easy to picture the Bible as a collection of serene people making peaceful observations about God’s schedule. That isn’t what you find. Many of them are shouting. Psalm 13 is short, and it opens with someone who has reached his limit. He skips the careful introduction and the worship preamble. He confronts God immediately:
Read those words again. They aren’t courteous, and they certainly aren’t a pretty prayer. They’re an accusation ending in a question mark. Still, someone preserved them. Another person copied them, and someone copied them again, until the words eventually appeared in millions of books tucked into hotel drawers. Apparently, making the complaint didn’t disqualify anyone. Somebody believed it belonged in Scripture. That doesn’t exactly comfort me, but it steadies me. It’s like discovering that what looked like fragile ice underfoot was concrete all along.
Why “God’s timing” makes a terrible anesthetic
I want to be careful here because Christian conversations about waiting often go wrong at this point. The familiar argument is simple: God’s schedule is better than yours, so you can relax. There may be truth in that. But it doesn’t do much for pain. You’re being asked to accept a delay by trusting an invisible timetable held by someone who hasn’t explained it. That doesn’t ease the wait. It only gives the same experience a prettier name. What has helped me is less grand. It isn’t, “God’s timing is perfect, so I shouldn’t hurt.” It’s closer to this: the ending hasn’t arrived, and I’ve been wrong about endings before. That’s a modest hurdle. Some days, I can get over it.
What a delay does not mean
Waiting doesn’t prove that you’ve failed. It isn’t a score. Nothing suggests God runs a rewards program where good behavior earns priority service while everyone else stays seated in reception. A wait doesn’t come with a guarantee, either. I won’t promise that the answer you want is on its way. Some prayers receive a completely different response. Other things people long for never come. Claiming otherwise would make me one more person trying to sell you something. Here’s what I can say: delay isn’t the same as silence, and neither necessarily means absence. People treat them as one experience, but they aren’t.
Most of Jesus Christ’s life passed without anyone recording what he did
Somehow, I reached my thirties before this detail really registered. Jesus lived for about thirty-three years, but the books cover only around three of them. What filled the other thirty? Woodworking and life in an overlooked little town. Meals with family. Sawdust. No documented miracle or sermon. No headline. Three decades of ordinary life came before three years that changed everything. I’m not claiming the same arithmetic governs your story. I couldn’t honestly promise that.
Still, it challenges a hidden assumption beneath why is God making me wait so long: that waiting time is wasted time and life doesn’t truly begin until the answer arrives. Whatever happened in Nazareth during those thirty years, God apparently didn’t consider it dead time.
Then consider what happened with Lazarus
John’s account includes a story in chapter eleven that I still can’t shake. Two sisters send Jesus a message: their brother is dying. These aren’t strangers. They’re close friends. Jesus receives the news and deliberately stays where he is for two more days. Lazarus dies. When Jesus finally arrives, Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. Each sister greets him with essentially the same charge: You came too late, although you didn’t need to. This is the part that stays with me. Jesus already knows the ending. In roughly ten minutes, Lazarus will walk out of the grave. The answer is effectively in his hand. Still, he weeps.
Only two words. It’s the shortest verse in the entire book, yet I suspect it carries more weight than many longer ones. A purposeful delay didn’t make their sorrow imaginary. Jesus didn’t tell the sisters to cheer up because everything would end well. Even though he was about to repair the situation, he entered their devastation. It devastated him too. If someone has told you that grieving during a wait shows weak faith, this verse gives you room to breathe. Jesus knew exactly what was coming, and he still cried.
The Holy Spirit, explained without the haze
A quick translation may help. If this language wasn’t part of your childhood, “the Holy Spirit” can sound like a supernatural figure with an official job title. Put as simply as I can: Christians believe God isn’t distant, running things from somewhere else. God is also described as within and alongside people, present and active. This isn’t an atmosphere or an emotion. It’s more like someone staying with you after the conversation turns dark. One passage surprised me when I finally slowed down enough to read it. Paul is writing to people in Rome about what happens when prayer itself no longer seems to work:
The words that matter to me are “groanings too deep for words.” There are no polished prayers here. No perfect technique. There is only groaning, the sound pain makes after language fails. Read plainly, the passage says that the prayer you can’t speak is still received. On nights when you say nothing because every request feels worn out, something carries it for you. Silence doesn’t remove you from consideration. I can’t prove that to you. I only know it’s what I hold when my hands are otherwise empty.
What trust looks like after nearly all of it is gone
Articles about waiting almost always reach the point where they tell you to trust God. This one won’t, at least not in that form. We often talk about trust as though it were a button anyone could press. It doesn’t work that way. Experience either builds trust or wears it down. If your current record with God says, “I asked and received nothing,” telling you to trust more is like advising someone with a fractured leg to heal by running. I’ve had to survive on a smaller version. Some weeks, trust isn’t certainty. It simply means I haven’t left. I keep having a conversation I dislike with someone who isn’t replying because, in my clearest moments, I still believe he’s there. That’s about it. It isn’t especially inspirational.
It looks more like remaining in a marriage through a difficult season more than standing triumphantly on a mountain. Truthfully, some weeks even that is beyond me. I may stop talking for a month. Stubbornness eventually brings me back, and I discover that my absence caused no catastrophe. The entrance is still open. I expect a scolding, but it never comes.
Patience isn’t an inborn quality that passed you by
People say, “I’m not a patient person,” as if they’re naming their blood type. But the patience I’ve seen in real life doesn’t look like serenity. A calm person isn’t always patient. Sometimes calm means they no longer care, which is different even if it looks similar from across the room. Real patience is less polished. You desperately want something, its absence continues to hurt, and you still refuse to destroy your life trying to force an early answer. In other words: desire without detonation. You can fall apart and practice patience at the same time. You can sob in your car on a Thursday in the grocery store parking lot and still be handling the wait faithfully. I know that particular parking lot rather well.
A few things that have helped, though I offer them cautiously
Advice makes me nervous here. Someone living through a long wait doesn’t need another program to follow. Still, a few practices have made certain Tuesdays easier to survive. Take what fits. Leave the rest. Put the complaint on paper. Don’t clean it up into a pleasant prayer. Write the angry, accusatory version as it really sounds. Psalm 13 gave me permission. I’ve also found that anger shrinks a little when it leaves your head and becomes something you can see on a page.
Give the unedited story to one person. Not an entire group. Choose someone who can resist trying to fix you within sixty seconds. Stop inspecting everyone else’s schedule. Comparing your wait with someone else’s life is like pouring battery acid over it. Mute their accounts if you need to. No one is keeping score of how graciously you follow someone who received the very thing you wanted. Do something tangible today that has nothing to do with your request.
Take a walk or clean the plates. Repair the drawer that’s been broken since March. Long waits can make it feel as though your whole life has stopped. Moving one concrete thing in the physical world is the quickest rebuttal I know.
Two earlier writers who wrestled with waiting longer than I have
My thoughts keep returning to two people who spent years considering this subject, back when no one could open a search bar at midnight. Andrew Murray was a South African pastor in the 1800s who devoted an entire book to waiting on God. His main point is refreshingly unglamorous. Rather than treating a wait as blank space before spiritual life begins, he saw it as the place where one particular belief gets dismantled: the quiet certainty that you can engineer your own results.
Broadly speaking, Murray argued that waiting changes you in ways an immediate answer would bypass. You can’t learn dependence just by reading about it. It develops when you truly have no power to control the outcome. For years, I resisted that idea. It sounded like a consolation prize, and on certain days it still does. But four years ago, I was someone who had to control everything. Most of that person has disappeared. I doubt a quick yes would have gotten rid of him.
Writing around the middle of the last century, A.W. Tozer often examined a related habit: our tendency to approach spiritual life like a purchase with an expected delivery date. He distrusted the demand for immediate results. He also wrote that God’s closeness remains constant even when our perception changes. In his view, awareness flickers. Presence doesn’t. If that’s right, the original question shifts a little. Perhaps waiting isn’t God withdrawing. Maybe he stays in the same place while our ability to sense him cuts in and out, like poor reception on a remote road. I can’t offer that as proof. It simply fits my experience better than the alternative.
When tonight weighs more than any article can carry
Words to pray when you’ve used up your own
You don’t have to pray this. But if words have left you and borrowed ones might help, this is a prayer I’ve genuinely spoken more than once while sitting in a parked car.
Common questions about waiting
Why does God take so long to answer us?
No one can identify the exact purpose behind your particular wait. Be cautious around anyone who insists otherwise. Christian teaching usually says that delay doesn’t necessarily mean rejection. It also suggests that a long wait can produce something an immediate response cannot, especially dependence and the slow dismantling of self-reliance. But that describes what waiting accomplishes. It doesn’t explain why your own delay has lasted this long. Those are different questions, and only one has an available answer.
If I’ve waited a long time, has God already answered no?
Not automatically. Assuming that can cause people to give up hope too soon. Honesty requires admitting that some delays eventually do become a no. The trouble is that while you’re living through them, no and not yet look exactly alike. If the final answer is no, that will become clear in time. At 1am tonight, you don’t need to reach a verdict with information you don’t have.
How can I continue praying when the situation stays the same?
Make the requirement small enough to meet. When longer prayers disappear, offer a single line. If all you have is anger, speak it. Psalm 13 shows that such prayer is allowed. If you can’t say anything, Romans 8:26 argues that prayer without language still reaches its destination. Persistence matters more than polish. Returning after a silent month doesn’t erase your progress. It only means you’ve returned.
So where are we now?
The notebook is still with me. The fact that I kept it probably means something. My prayer remains unanswered, and sometimes I still refresh my email at 4:12. I won’t dress this up and promise that your answer is coming. I don’t know that, and you’d spot the dishonesty immediately. What I can offer is smaller. You’re allowed to complain. You’re allowed to cry even when you know how the story ends. These waiting years aren’t the disposable part of your life.
If you’d like to stay with the subject, the Waiting cave has more pieces written from roughly this same seat. You can leave it here too. I hope the next hour feels a little less heavy than the one before it.
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