The In-Between

“The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.”(Lamentations 3:25 ESV)

In his book, The In-Between: Embracing the Tension Between Now and the Next Big Thing, Jeff Goins addresses our natural tendency to rush those inevitable pauses – those times of waiting – that are part and parcel of our lives. “Perhaps the abundant life we’ve been seeking has little to do with big events and comes in a subtler form: embracing the pauses in between major beats.”

He goes on to say, “But what if waiting was not simply some grand inconvenience, as we often treat it, but rather the very tool God uses to change how we react to those delays and interruptions. We might have to pause and wonder what lesson we need to learn here, what opportunity we have to find the next piece of our destiny… In the waiting, we become.”

To be honest, I loathe waiting. Yet those in-between moments – between the asking and the receiving, between the grieving and the healing, between the yearning and God’s timing—are where growth happens. Farmers understand this better than anyone. They know they can’t rush the process between planting and harvesting because seeds must mature at the proper pace.

Do you feel trapped in a season of waiting? Take hope in the knowledge that God never wastes our in-betweens. Don’t endure the wait, embrace the wait. For it is fertile ground, the place where we deepen our roots in order that we might become “oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His splendor” (Isaiah 61:3).

Prayer: Lord, curb my impulse to rush those in-between moments. Help me wait on your good promises, to deepen my roots in the soil of your word as I wait for your purpose and your plan to unfold. May the waiting space be fertile ground where seeds of faith and trust and hope take root and produce fruit that is pleasing to you. In your name I pray, Amen.

Thought: Biblically, waiting is not just something we have to do until we get what we want. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what God wants us to be – John Ortberg.