Waiting Quietly
“It is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord.”
Lamentations 3:26
There’s a saying: “Sometimes when God closes a door, He opens a window.” That may be true (even if you won’t find that saying in the Bible).
But sometimes, when God closes a door, we can be surprised to look around and see other doors shut, too, with no open door or window in sight.
Earlier in Lamentations 3, the writer said:
“He has walled me in so I cannot get out; He has weighed me down with chains.”
It can seem like we are completely closed in, with no visible way out, and even worse, with no timeline for when the present situation might change or hopefully improve. We’re just seemingly stuck. Waiting. Tick, tock. Tick. Tock. The sounds of the clock’s slow movement echo off the hard walls around us, reminding us that time continues to move even as we remain stuck.
There’s another saying that I picked up in my mental health journey over the years:
“Just because you’re having a bad day doesn’t mean you have a bad life.”
But what about when it’s a string of bad days? When we’re counting the bad days by etching each number into the walls that have enclosed us? When no amount of digging, like Edmond Dantes or Andy Dufresne, provides us with escape?
We’re simply waiting.
I’m one who generally likes to have a plan, to see a path, to create action steps. But there are times when I can’t even do that.
So I wait. And I try to wait quietly, to wait patiently, trusting that, as the writer of Lamentations said, “It is good.”
