The Lord is Good in Your Waiting

“The Lord is good unto them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him.” Lamentations 3:25

Do you like waiting? Neither do I. This verse has been a comfort to me over the years, but I recently realized I had been making an assumption about God’s goodness that isn’t at all what this verse is meant to convey.

You see, I read this verse, and was comforted to think that God is good, that someday whatever it was I was waiting for would come, or the wait would be over, and then I would see God’s goodness. The assumption was that God would be good to me, when the wait was over.

But the simple truth is that God is good, right now, right in the middle of waiting or seeking or struggle or pain. God is good. We don’t have to wait for a distant someday for His goodness to be real in our lives.

I pointed this out in another post recently, but the very next verse in Lamentations 3 shows us that the waiting itself is often God’s goodness in action:

“It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.” (v.26)

Psalm 119:71 says,

“It is good for me that I have been afflicted: that I might learn Thy statutes.”

Sometimes, it’s not that we don’t see the goodness of God—it’s that we don’t like what His goodness means for us in a particular situation.

It’s like a child, sitting at the dinner table, staring down at a serving of broccoli that does not look or smell “good”, not knowing or caring that it contains important vitamins and nutrients that will help him be strong and healthy for the things he wants to do. He can either sit and stare, wallowing in his will’s cry of “I don’t want to!”, and maybe throw a fit while he’s at it—or he can trust that his mom knows what she’s doing, and take a bite.

We may not like what God allows us to go through, but we have a choice: to accept God’s present goodness in faith, or to wallow in doubt, miserable in our refusal to settle into the circumstances God has led us into.

Dear Reader, are you struggling to see God’s goodness to you today? Look at your struggle with new eyes. Choose to trust, not just that God will be good, but that He is good—right now, right at this moment, and that He has indeed promised to work even this together for your good.

Accept His definition of “good,” accept His grace to keep close to Him, and keep seeking the Lord. Settle for nothing less than His presence.

“Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.”

Psalm 27:14