“Wait on the Lord.”
A Reflection on Disappointment and Patience in God’s Timing
If we’re honest, most of us have heard those words at moments when we least wanted them. Sometimes they ring hollow, like a polite way to avoid sitting with someone else’s grief. They can land as unhelpfully as the dreaded, “God needed another angel,” offered to the newly bereaved. And yet—Scripture does not let us wriggle out of it so easily. Waiting on the Lord is not just pious filler. It is, in fact, a recurring command and deep truth about how God relates to us.
The problem, of course, is that God does not keep time the way we do. “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (2 Peter 3:8). The psalmist reminds us that “a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past” (Psalm 90:4). And Ecclesiastes insists: “He has made everything suitable for its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). God is not bound to our clocks, calendars, or deadlines.
But this doesn’t make disappointment hurt any less. When we pray for healing, and the pain remains. When we plead for reconciliation, and the other person stays cold as ice. When we repent and confess, yet the shame lingers like smoke that won’t lift. These are the moments when waiting on the Lord is not a gentle reminder but a sharp ache.
Scripture does not hide such disappointments. Think of Hannah, who poured out her heart in tears because her womb remained closed while others mocked her (1 Samuel 1:6–8). Year after year she prayed, and year after year nothing changed. Yet, in God’s time, Samuel was born—the prophet who would anoint kings and shepherd Israel into a new age. Hannah’s disappointment was real, and her waiting was bitter, but God did not forget her.
And Hannah is not alone. In our own time, one of the great saints of the modern Church, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, lived her entire public ministry under the shadow of disappointment. After her death, when her private letters and diary were published, the world learned that she had spent decades feeling abandoned by God—praying, serving, loving the poor, while inwardly experiencing only silence. What we might call “the dark night of the soul” lasted for years upon years. And yet, she did not turn away. She kept serving Christ in the least of these. She waited on the Lord, even when His presence felt impossibly far. And the Church came to see her perseverance in faith not as weakness, but as sanctity.
Together, Hannah and Mother Teresa remind us that waiting on the Lord is not passive, nor is it easy. It is the lived faith of saints both ancient and modern—faith that cries, laments, and keeps going, even when God feels late or absent. Their witness tells us that waiting itself can be holy.
And so we come back to those weary words: “Wait on the Lord.” Not as a trite dismissal, but as an invitation to trust that our story is not finished, that disappointment does not have the last word, that God’s timing, though maddeningly slow to us, is purposeful. To wait on the Lord is to confess that our hope is not in how quickly life turns around, but in the One who is faithful through all seasons.
This week, let us take up the song of Taizé, praying not only with our lips but with our lives:
Prepare the way for the Lord
Make a straight path for Him
Wait for the Lord, His day is near
Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heart
The Glory of the Lord shall be revealed
Wait for the Lord, His day is near
Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heart
Seek first the Kingdom of God
Seek and you shall find
Wait for the Lord, His day is near
Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heart
Oh, Lord, show us Your way
Guide us in Your truth
Wait for the Lord, His day is near
Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heart
Pax et Bonum!
Fr. Ben +
