Danielle is working on staff at The Globe Church as part of her mission work with ReachGlobal. In this blog, she shares what she’s learnt about waiting on God.

I have met hundreds of people in my 31 years of life, yet I’ve never come across someone who absolutely loves waiting. If there is anything humanity can find unity in, it is the truth that having to wait can be a real bother.

Despite how much we dislike waiting, it’s quite clear in Scripture that we are called to wait. We are called to practice patience in the unknown. To walk with Jesus is to learn the art of waiting.

I am often brought back to the story of Abraham and Sarah when I think about the call to wait. Abraham had been chosen by  God to be the father of a great nation, but he received this great promise with confusion.  How could Abraham’s descendants become a great nation when he and his wife Sarah were unable to have children? They struggled as they waited; they questioned God and doubted His plan.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like us? We believe God is good, we believe He does care for us, yet waiting for Him to do what He promised is taxing. We start to doubt our callings, we start to give caveats to God’s promises, and we even start to think that God may have gotten too busy and left us out of His grand plans. But, what we think about God, however false or true, doesn’t change who God is or what He does.

God knew He wanted to make a nation out of Abraham’s lineage, and He did, just not in the timing Abraham and Sarah expected. It didn’t take 1 year, or even 5 years. It took 25 years for them to have a son together. Think about that – 25 years of trying to believe that what God promised would actually happen. When you read the whole story (see Genesis 15-21), you can see how messy the waiting season was. Abraham and Sarah didn’t understand what God was doing, and they even tried to take the fulfillment of the promise into their own hands. But manufacturing a move of God is impossible. As Psalm 127:1 states, “Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain.”  Yet even after their own striving and stumbling, God showed up and fulfilled His promise. He gave them Isaac as a son. Our God has always been and will always be faithful.

10 years ago, when I was in my final year of university, the Lord made it clear that He was calling me into mission work. When I received this call, my first instinct wasn’t to wait. It was to make things happen. So I strove to become a missionary, but nothing seemed to be working out. The different organizations or avenues I pursued either fell through or didn’t feel right at the time. As I struggled through that season, a friend encouraged me with this story of Abraham and Sarah. When God gives a call, it doesn’t mean it’ll happen immediately. Sometimes it takes 25 years, but He remains faithful.

What I realized in the waiting is that who I was becoming was more important than what I was becoming. God was less concerned about making me into a career missionary than He was about making me His humble child. I believe our character matters more to the Lord than our career. He prefers patience over pride in us, so at times we must wait in order for the patience to be cultivated and the pride to be pruned.

To my new church family: here I am 10 years later, living 5,500 miles away from where God first gave me the call to pursue mission work. I exhort you, as many did to me for the last decade, to wait on the Lord. The Lord who was faithful to Abraham and Sarah is the same Lord we serve today. He will never leave or forsake or forget you. Trust that He cares for you and will make a way in His timing; so for now, pay attention to who you are becoming as you wait.

We shall not grow weary of waiting upon God if we remember how long and how graciously He once waited for us. – Charles Spurgeon