Waiting is not nothing.
It feels like nothing, which is part of what makes it hard. But when you're in a season of waiting for a door to open, for clarity to arrive, or for the next chapter to make itself known, the absence of obvious progress reads as absence of movement altogether. Nothing is happening. Nothing is growing. You are simply standing still while life moves around you.
But that's not what's actually happening.
Seeds do their most important work underground, invisible, in the waiting period before anything breaks the surface. The gardener who digs them up to check on the progress interrupts the very process trying to be confirmed. Sometimes the most faithful thing is to leave the ground alone and trust that something is happening in the dark that doesn't need your intervention to succeed.
I've spent a lot of time in waiting seasons. More than I would have chosen. And I've had to learn, imperfectly and repeatedly, the discipline of treating the waiting as part of the work rather than as time lost from it.
What grows in the waiting is often exactly what the next season requires. Patience that couldn't have been developed any other way. Clarity that only comes when the noise of activity quiets down enough to hear it. A deeper understanding of what you actually want, as opposed to what you thought you wanted before the waiting stripped away the less essential things.
The waiting is not wasted. It is actually, in its own quiet and unglamorous way, quite productive.
What you're growing in the dark will matter a great deal when the light comes. Just wait for it.
What has a season of waiting produced in you that you couldn't have grown any other way? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
