I checked my phone again.
Nothing had changed in the last eleven minutes. Apparently, I believed that my mechanic might sense my concern. Every time my phone got a notification, I would look over and unlock the screen. Every ding. Every beep or buzz.
My phone lay beside my keyboard, close enough that I could see it in my peripheral vision. The house was quiet since my wife had our only source of transportation. I tapped my foot against the floor and tried to work, but I kept thinking about texting him.
“Hey! Just checking in...”
I wrote the message a few times, then deleted it. Each time I remember thinking, “This is stupid.”
Eventually, I put my phone down and worked on something else. I got up, went into another room and, for a little while, completely forgot about the text.
When I came back to my office, I sat down and kept working.
Then it dawned on me.
“I wonder if he texted?”
To my surprise, he had.
I rushed to open the message. The truck wasn’t fixed. I still didn’t have transportation. I was still going to spend money on the repair and wait for him to finish it.
Yet, I felt better.
I sat there wondering, “Why am I like this?”
The problem wasn’t solved. The truck wasn’t fixed. The waiting hadn’t ended. So why did knowing the plan make me feel so much better?
The problem wasn’t the waiting. It was waiting without knowing.
There’s a reason the microwave has a countdown. There’s a reason restaurants tell us, “It’ll be about twenty minutes.” There’s a reason we obsessively check the little map showing our DoorDash driver making his way toward our house.
We’re remarkably patient when we can see the clock.
It’s waiting without a clock that gets me.
When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going
I wonder what Abraham thought when God told him to leave his home.
He was seventy-five years old. What was he leaving behind that couldn’t be packed onto a camel? What questions would Sarah have asked him, and how many could he actually answer?
God had told Abraham to go “to the land that I will show you.”
Not where it was. Not how long it would take to get there.
Just go, and I will show you.
I wonder how long Abraham traveled before the excitement of being called by God collided with a much more ordinary question:
“Where exactly are we going?”
One of the advantages of reading Abraham’s story is also one of its dangers.
We can turn the page.
Abraham couldn’t.
God often asks us to live faithfully on the page we’re actually on.
A Promise and Tomorrow
Abraham eventually arrived in Canaan. There, God appeared to him and said something fascinating:
“To your offspring I will give this land.” (Genesis 12:7)
There’s just one problem.
Abraham doesn’t have any offspring.
Genesis has already told us Sarah was barren. Before Abraham packed anything, before he left home, and before God spoke these words about his offspring, Sarah couldn’t have children.
God wasn’t simply promising Abraham land. He was promising a future Abraham couldn’t see any reasonable path toward. Somewhere in that future there would be children, then grandchildren, and eventually enough descendants to fill the land.
But Abraham was standing there without even the first child.
We know Isaac is coming.
Abraham didn’t.
He had to live the story one day at a time. And on this particular day, Sarah was still barren.
Yet Abraham does something remarkably simple.
He builds an altar.
I think I would have wanted more details first. When will Sarah have this child? How will this happen? How long are we going to be here?
Abraham doesn’t have those answers yet.
He has a promise.
And then, apparently, he has tomorrow.
When Tomorrow Keeps Coming
Time passed.
Abraham traveled. There was a famine. He went to Egypt and came back. He and Lot separated. There were battles to fight and people to rescue.
His life was anything but empty.
But still, no child.
God spoke again and told Abraham that his offspring would be like the dust of the earth, more than he could count.
And still, no child.
At first, waiting can almost feel hopeful. You check the phone because surely the call is coming. You watch the door because you expect it to open. You wake up wondering if today might finally be the day.
Then today becomes tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes next week.
Eventually, enough tomorrows pile up that you stop wondering whether today will be the day and start wondering whether the day is ever coming at all.
By Genesis 15, Abraham finally says something:
“O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless...” (Genesis 15:2)
I keep coming back to that word.
Continue.
God had promised. Abraham had believed Him. Abraham had obeyed Him.
And Sarah was still barren.
Sometimes we imagine faith as the absence of questions. But Abraham asks.
“Behold, you have given me no offspring.”
You promised me descendants.
I don’t have any.
Abraham isn’t telling God something God doesn’t know. He’s putting words to the distance between what God has said and what Abraham can see.
God doesn’t rebuke him.
Instead, God takes him outside.
“Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” (Genesis 15:5)
I wonder how long Abraham looked.
Away from the tents and fires, the darkness would have stretched farther than he could see. One star. Then another. Hundreds. Thousands. Far too many for an old man standing beneath them to count.
“So shall your offspring be.”
Abraham had asked God for something he could understand.
God gave him stars.
The circumstances hadn’t changed. Sarah was still barren. Abraham was still getting older. There wasn’t a child sleeping in their tent that night.
God didn’t end the wait.
He reminded Abraham who had made the promise.
And Abraham believed Him.
Then morning came.
The stars disappeared with the sunrise. Sarah was still Sarah. Abraham was still Abraham. The promise was still a promise.
And they had another day to live.
When Waiting Gets Long
Then another year passes.
Sarah was getting older. So was Abraham. The promise had not changed, but their circumstances had.
Eventually, Sarah came to Abraham with an idea.
She had a servant named Hagar.
Perhaps this was how God’s promise was supposed to happen.
It’s easy to read Genesis 16 knowing what comes next and wonder how Abraham and Sarah could make such a decision. But they couldn’t turn the page. They had a promise from God, a barren woman, an aging man, and years of waiting.
So they found a way to move things along.
Abraham slept with Hagar. She became pregnant, and Ishmael was born.
Their plan worked.
At least, it seemed to.
There is something frightening about that. Sometimes the door we force actually opens. Sometimes the plan we manufacture actually succeeds.
But almost immediately, things began to fall apart. Hagar looked at Sarah differently. Sarah became angry. Hagar eventually fled into the wilderness.
They had ended one kind of waiting and created an entirely different kind of pain.
I understand the temptation.
Waiting without a clock makes me uncomfortable. Eventually, I start looking for clocks I can control. Maybe I can send another message. Make another phone call. Push the door a little harder.
There is a fine line between faithfully taking the next step and trying to write the next page ourselves.
Abraham crossed it.
Thirteen Years
Genesis 16 ends with a detail that is easy to miss.
Abraham was eighty-six years old when Ishmael was born.
Then you turn the page.
“When Abram was ninety-nine years old the LORD appeared to Abram...” (Genesis 17:1)
Eighty-six.
Ninety-nine.
Thirteen years disappear in the turn of a page.
Scripture doesn’t give us chapters describing those years.
Abraham had to live them.
Thirteen summers. Thirteen winters. Thirteen birthdays.
Ishmael learned to walk and talk. He grew from a baby into a young man. Abraham’s hair grew grayer. Sarah grew older.
And still, no Isaac.
Maybe Abraham thought Ishmael was the answer. Maybe he had misunderstood God. Maybe this was how the promise was supposed to happen after all.
We aren’t told.
We are simply told that when Abraham was ninety-nine, God appeared again.
God had not forgotten.
Thirteen years had passed for Abraham.
The promise hadn’t aged a day for God.
When the Promise Becomes Impossible
God tells Abraham that Sarah will have a son.
Not Hagar.
Sarah.
Abraham falls on his face and laughs.
I’m not sure I blame him.
He is almost one hundred. Sarah is ninety. Twenty-four years earlier, God’s promise had been difficult to understand.
Now it seemed impossible.
Sarah laughs too when she hears the news.
God responds with a question:
“Is anything too hard for the LORD?” (Genesis 18:14)
That’s an easy verse to put on a coffee mug.
It’s a much harder question when you’ve been waiting twenty-four years.
Romans 4 tells us Abraham didn’t pretend his circumstances weren’t real. He considered his own body. He considered Sarah’s inability to have children.
Faith didn’t require Abraham to close his eyes to reality.
He simply became convinced that reality wasn’t the only thing that mattered.
God had spoken too.
Romans says Abraham was “fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”
I don’t think Abraham learned that in an afternoon.
Maybe that kind of conviction takes years. Maybe it takes stars and failures. Maybe it takes trying to write the story yourself and discovering you’re not particularly good at being the author.
Maybe some things can only be learned while you’re waiting.
At the Appointed Time
Then, finally, Sarah becomes pregnant.
After all the years of wondering, Genesis describes the fulfillment almost quietly:
“And Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him.” (Genesis 21:2)
At the time.
Abraham had spent twenty-five years without being able to see the clock.
God apparently had one all along.
Abraham was one hundred years old when Isaac was born.
I try to imagine him holding that little boy. The same arms that had packed his belongings twenty-five years earlier now held the thing God had promised.
Maybe he remembered leaving home. The land. The stars. Hagar. Ishmael. His own laughter.
Twenty-five years is a lot of life to hold alongside a newborn child.
The promise had finally become something Abraham could touch.
The waiting was over.
Or at least, that’s where I expected the story about waiting to end.
It doesn’t.
The Man Who Walked Up the Mountain
Years later, God tells Abraham to take Isaac to a mountain.
The son he had waited for.
The son God had promised.
Isaac.
God asks Abraham to offer him as a sacrifice.
There are few passages in Scripture that make me more uncomfortable than Genesis 22. But reading it alongside the previous chapters made me notice something.
Abraham gets up the next morning and goes.
The man who tried to help God fulfill His promise in Genesis 16 now walks toward a mountain carrying that promise with him.
Something has changed.
Hebrews tells us Abraham believed God was able even to raise Isaac from the dead.
In Genesis 16, Abraham couldn’t see how God could fulfill the promise, so he created another way.
In Genesis 22, Abraham still couldn’t see how God could fulfill the promise.
But this time he trusted God with what he could not understand.
What happened between those two chapters?
Years. Failure. Grace. Altars. Questions. Silence. Stars. A son.
Waiting.
Suddenly, I began to wonder whether Isaac was the only thing God had been working on for those twenty-five years.
Maybe God wasn’t simply preparing Isaac for Abraham.
Maybe God was preparing Abraham for Isaac.
Maybe I’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question
I started thinking again about my phone sitting beside my keyboard.
Eleven minutes.
That’s all it took for me to get restless.
Abraham waited twenty-five years.
His story doesn’t mean everything I want will eventually happen if I wait long enough. God made Abraham a specific promise. I can’t turn his promise into God’s guarantee for every prayer I pray.
Some things I’m waiting for may happen. Some may happen differently than I expect. Some may never happen at all.
That’s uncomfortable because I still want the clock.
I want God to tell me when. I want to know how. I want to turn the page and make sure everything works out before I decide how much I trust Him on the page I’m living now.
So I’ve spent a lot of my life asking: How do I get through the wait?
It’s not a bad question.
I’m just beginning to think there may be a better one: Who am I becoming while I wait?
Abraham didn’t simply arrive at the end of twenty-five years with Isaac.
He arrived there as a different man.
The road had changed the traveler.
He had trusted. Questioned. Failed. Tried to force the story. Watched the impossible become possible. And eventually, he learned to place even the promise itself back into God’s hands.
The waiting wasn’t empty space between God’s promise and God’s purpose.
It was part of what God used to form Abraham.
Another Day to Live
Maybe that’s where you are.
You’ve prayed. You’ve obeyed the best you know how. You’ve checked the phone and watched the door. Maybe you’ve even tried to force a few things along the way.
And you still don’t know what happens next.
I wish I could tell you when the page will turn.
I can’t.
I can’t promise your story will end the way you’ve pictured it either.
But you have this page.
You have today.
What is this season revealing about you? Where has waiting exposed your need for control? Are you becoming bitter, or softer? Are you learning to trust God without requiring Him to explain Himself first?
I still prefer clocks.
I like countdowns. I like plans. I’m probably still going to check my phone more than I should.
But Abraham’s story has made me wonder whether my obsession with knowing what happens next can cause me to miss what God is doing now.
We can turn the page in Abraham’s story.
We can’t turn the page in ours.
Maybe faithfulness is learning to live with God on the page we’re actually on.
So perhaps the next time I find myself asking, “God, how do I get through this wait?” I’ll try to remember Abraham.
And I’ll ask a different question.
God, who are You helping me become while I wait?
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“Abraham’s story has made me wonder whether my obsession with knowing what happens next can cause me to miss what God is doing now.”
this is just one of many that heavily spoke out to me. your writing is incredible. i love the realness of it. as a reader, I feel drawn in almost immediately. thank you for sharing your gift.
Beautiful