What to Do While You’re Waiting on God
Trusting His Timing as Much as His Direction
Waiting is hard, especially when you are waiting for something good.
When you are young, it can sometimes feel like half of life is waiting. You wait to drive, graduate, leave on a mission, figure out what you want to do with your life, or finally have more independence.
But some kinds of waiting are a lot harder than that.
Maybe you are waiting for a difficult situation at home to change. Maybe you are hoping a friendship gets better, waiting for an answer to a prayer, or asking God to open a door that still seems completely closed.
Sometimes the most frustrating part is that you believe God could change it.
So why hasn’t He?
Ecclesiastes gives us this reminder:
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
—Ecclesiastes 3:1
That may be one of the harder parts of trusting God.
It is one thing to trust His direction, but it can be another thing entirely to trust His timing.
Elder Neal A. Maxwell once taught:
“The issue for us is trusting God enough to trust also His timing.”
I think that is such a powerful statement because most of us probably believe God has power.
We believe He can answer a prayer, open a door, heal, provide an opportunity, or change a circumstance.
The harder question sometimes becomes:
Do I still trust Him when He hasn’t done it yet?
Think about growing a plant.
You can plant the seed, water it, give it sunlight, protect it, pull weeds, and make sure the soil is good. There are all kinds of things you can do to help it grow.
But you cannot pull on the plant and make it grow faster.
There are some things you can control.
And then there is time.
I think life works that way too.
There are things God expects you to do while you wait. You can pray, prepare, work, study, repent, ask for help, seek good counsel, keep commandments, serve, and continue moving forward.
But there are other things you simply cannot control.
You cannot control every opportunity that comes, another person’s choices, exactly when an answer arrives, or every circumstance around you.
And you definitely cannot force God’s timetable to become yours.
Doctrine and Covenants 123 contains some of the most practical advice I know for these moments:
“Let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power.”
I love that phrase—“that lie in our power”—because maybe one of the reasons waiting becomes so exhausting is that we start trying to carry things that never belonged on our side in the first place.
We do our part, and then we start trying to do God’s part too.
We pray, but then we also try to control exactly how and when He answers. We prepare, but then we want to control every opportunity. We make our best decision, but then we want a guarantee that nothing difficult will happen afterward.
That will wear you out.
Faith means learning to do everything that really does lie within your power while eventually trusting God with everything that doesn’t.
That does not mean you stop caring about the outcome, stop praying for miracles, or pretend that waiting becomes easy.
It simply means you begin learning to say:
“Heavenly Father, I am going to faithfully do what I can do, and I am going to trust You with what I cannot.”
Sometimes the waiting itself may even become part of what God uses to change us.
Patience develops. Faith becomes deeper. Priorities become clearer. We learn to pray differently, and we may even become more compassionate toward other people who are waiting too.
And sometimes, after enough time passes, we look backward and begin to recognize that God was doing something during that season that we simply could not see at the time.
Can you think of something like that from your own life?
Something you once desperately wanted to happen sooner, but now you understand the timing a little better?
Maybe you are even grateful now that something did not happen exactly when or how you originally wanted it to.
Those experiences become evidence too.
They remind us that the same God who was working while we waited before may still be working while we wait now.
Scripture
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
—Ecclesiastes 3:1
“Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power.”
—Doctrine and Covenants 123:17
Reflection
What are you waiting for right now?
Which parts of that situation actually lie within your power, and which parts are you trying to control that really belong in God’s hands?
Can you remember a time when something did not happen when you wanted it to, but looking backward you can now see something you learned or a way God helped you during the waiting?
Today’s Challenge
Take a piece of paper and make two columns:
What Lies in My Power
What Belongs to God
Think about one situation you are currently waiting on and begin sorting the different parts of it into those two columns.
Then choose one thing from your column and do it.
Pray. Prepare. Work. Have the conversation. Ask for help. Keep moving forward.
Then take something from the other column and deliberately place it back into God’s hands in prayer.
You may need to do that more than once.
That is okay.
Trust is something we keep choosing.
Christ-Centered Thought
Jesus Christ understands what it means to submit His will to the Father.
In Gethsemane, knowing exactly what was ahead of Him, He prayed:
“Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”
Jesus Christ did not pretend that what He was facing was easy. He asked for what He desired, but He trusted His Father more than He demanded a particular outcome.
There will be times when you know exactly what you want God to do.
Ask Him. Hope for it. Pray for it. Work toward it.
But faith eventually becomes more than believing that God has the power to give you what you want.
Faith becomes trusting Jesus Christ enough to keep following Him even when His timing—or even His answer—is different from yours.
You may still be waiting for something today.
Keep doing what lies within your power.
Keep following Christ.
And trust Him with the rest.
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