I am in one of the best and most difficult seasons of my life, and most of it has been spent waiting.

When you're in a waiting season, you feel powerless, weak, and stuck. That's especially hard if you have a high bias for action (like I do), and patience is not something that comes easily to me. But despite my stubborn ignorance, here's what I'm finding.

1. You Will Always Underestimate God

Not occasionally. Always.

We cannot fully grasp God's power, sovereignty, or omniscience. The gap is not about effort or study. It's categorical. Isaiah 55:8-9 puts it plainly: God's thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways.

The distance between them is described as the heavens above the earth, not a small gap you close with more effort or information.

Think of it like asking someone 4'10" to two-hand dunk on a 10-foot rim with no assistance. The problem isn't effort or preparation. They are simply incapable of making that basket.

This is why most waiting-season frustration is misdirected. We get frustrated because we're trying to evaluate what God is doing using a framework that isn't worthy of Him. In Job 38, God responds to Job's questions not with answers but with a series of His own: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?

The point wasn't to humiliate Job. It's to reorient him. When you accept that your perspective is genuinely limited, the question shifts from:

"Why isn't God doing what I think He should?"

to:

"What is God doing that I can't yet see?"

Those are two different conversations, and only one of them is useful.

2. Hard Seasons Expose What You Actually Believe

There's a difference between what you say you believe and what your behavior reveals you believe.

When the pressure is high and the timeline is unclear, the things you've said about trust and faith get tested at the level of your actual decisions, your prayers, your emotional responses. James 1:2-4 describes this directly: the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.

Romans 5:3-4 goes further, tracing a progression from suffering to endurance to character to hope. Neither passage treats difficulty as an accident. Both treat it as a mechanism.

Most people in difficult seasons focus entirely on getting out, which is completely understandable. But the push to exit often leaves them missing what God is trying to produce through it.

Difficulty shows you exactly where your faith is thin, where you've been holding a theoretical position without having actually internalized it.

3. Most People Are Praying Wrong

I have been.

For a long time I've treated prayer like a deal:

God, here's what I'd like, here's my timeline, here's why it makes sense, here's how I am going to serve you after you do this my way.

The assumption underneath that kind of prayer is that God needs to be convinced, that the goal is to get Him on your side. But that framing puts you at the center of the conversation and positions God as the one who either cooperates or doesn't.

The Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 is structured differently. It opens with God's name, God's kingdom, God's will, before it ever gets to human need. That ordering is intentional. Prayer in a waiting season sounds more like: I don't know what's best. You do. I'm open to your will. Just lead me.

Reorienting your heart that way is harder than it sounds, because it requires letting go of what you want, what you think you need, and whatever deadlines you seem to think you're constrained by.

When you get there, something shifts. The anxiety of trying to manage God's response starts to lift, because you're no longer trying to manage it. Philippians 4:6-7 describes this as a peace that surpasses understanding, a peace that guards your heart and mind. That's not a feeling you can simply manufacture.

It requires surrender.

The same principle applies to fasting. I've fasted thinking it would move God toward what I wanted, that it was a way of getting His attention or demonstrating seriousness.

Fasting doesn't change God. It changes you. Isaiah 58 makes this clear when God rebukes Israel for fasting that was really just performance and self-interest. The fast He describes instead is one of humility and release.

It's a discipline designed to silence your demands and create space for your own heart to be reshaped by God.

(I'm still working on this myself)

4. You Don't Know What's Best for You

You know what you want and that is a completely different thing.

When you want something specific, a job, an outcome, a resolution, it's easy to treat that want as evidence that it's right for you. But wanting something and knowing it's best for you are not the same thing.

Proverbs 3:5-6 is direct about this: trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. The warning isn't against thinking. It's against trusting your own judgment as the final word.

We have limited information, limited perspective, and a long track record of being wrong about what would actually make us better off. Proverbs 14:12 puts it starkly: there is a way that seems right to a person, and its end is the way of death.

So here's the honest question: if you could see both destinations clearly, where you would take yourself and where God would take you, which would you choose? Most people, if they stop and think about it, would choose God's destination.

5. The Season Is Temporary. Don't Spend It Poorly.

Nobody knows how long they have, and once you actually realize that, it's sobering.

James 4:14 describes life as a vapor, appearing for a moment and then vanishing. If life itself is that brief, the waiting season inside it is even more so. 2 Corinthians 4:17 calls our present troubles light and momentary when set against what they are producing.

We tend to treat the waiting season as dead time, time that doesn't count until the thing we're waiting for arrives. But that framing is a loss. The season itself is time, and it's yours. If these were your last days, weeks, months on earth, how would you spend it?

Would anything change?

6. The Spiral Is a Lie.

There's a voice that shows up when things are out of your control. It asks: Did God forget about you? Does He even care? What if none of this works out?

And if you let it, it will build a fairly convincing case, drawing on your emotions, your exhaustion, and your incomplete information.

The way I have found to combat this thinking and stop it is to ask one direct question: do I actually believe that? The honest answer is almost always no. You don't actually believe God has forgotten you. You're scared, and that's a different thing.

The Psalms are full of this tension. Psalm 13 opens with "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" four times in two verses. You are not the first person to feel this way, or think these thoughts. But allowing them to consume you will make it significantly harder for you during this season.

If you push even further: has He ever failed anyone who trusted Him? Lamentations 3:25-26 says the Lord is good to those who wait for Him, and describes waiting in silence as a good thing, using the Hebrew word tov, the same word used in Genesis when God called creation good.

Across every generation, every circumstance, every person who waited longer than felt bearable, the answer is no. It's the nature of who He is.

He isn't going to fail you.

Waiting is hard. But living without God is the hardest.

I can't promise you much, but I can promise you that His way is always better.