Waiting on God
It has been on my heart to make my first writing piece about feeling distant from God. I held off on writing this piece until now because after countless times of praying to feel God’s presence and answers, He made something known to me.
I haven’t had it easy for the past two years. I was trying to heal from heartbreak and 2017 felt like the worst year of my life. I had a lot of trouble feeling God’s love and God’s presence in my life during that year and I would constantly pray to God and wait for Him to make 2018 my year. In 2018 I wanted to heal. I wanted to know my purpose and be myself again. It has now been 10 months into 2018 and God has definitely heard and answered my prayers. It felt great feeling God’s presence all over my life again, but recently I have been spiritually dry.
For the past two months I’ve been falling back into patterns of feeling sadness and confusion about life. I realized that those patterns stemmed from rejection of what I thought would be breakthroughs, feeling like things in my life recently have not been going right, or that God has been too slow with answering my prayers. Being in that slump has made me lose motivation in intentionally seeking God and talking to God. My period of spiritual dryness has made me question whether or not I was being a good person and if I was being the person that God wants me to be.
Hours before typing this I poured out all of my anger and frustration to God in my journal since journaling is my form of prayer. Two hours after that I had my own praise and worship in my room. Minutes before typing this God spoke to me while I was listening to music. As cringey or corny as it may sound, God spoke to me through a Hannah Montana song called “Life’s What You Make It”. One of the lines in the song was “Stay mad why do that? Give yourself a break”. Through that song God told me that even if He makes me go through long seasons of silence, or even mini seasons of silence where it seems as if God is not answering my prayers, I do not have to be mad and frustrated with God. I do not have to be mad or stay mad because life really is what I make it. When God makes us wait, it is really an opportunity for us to seek Him even more than we usually do, it is an opportunity for our faith to be tested and strengthened. If we are waiting on God, if we are waiting for God to make something happen in our lives, we can choose to be impatient or we can choose to believe that God is still Good even through the wait.
Something that I learned from what I have been going through recently has been that waiting on God does not mean to just literally sit and wait for God to do something great and life changing in our lives. It means to make the daily effort to seek God and try our best to be the person that He wants us to be. We all have a choice, and God always gives us the freedom to make our own decisions, to choose Him or to distance ourselves from Him. In the end it is up to us to remind ourselves that with whatever we choose, God is still around, He cares and He is always working things out for our own good.
