Trusting God While You Are Waiting

Nobody warns you how much of recovery is waiting. Waiting for the appointment. Waiting for the swelling to go down, the words to come back, the hand to open. Waiting to feel like yourself. And if you are a person of faith, there is another layer underneath all of it. You prayed. You believed. And you are still waiting.

I know that room. I had my stroke in 2024, and I am still in recovery. I have spent long afternoons asking God to hurry, and long evenings wondering why He would not. What I want to tell you is not that the waiting gets easy. It is that the waiting can hold you instead of hollowing you out.

Waiting Is Not Doing Nothing

We treat waiting like an empty hallway between the hard thing and the healed thing. It is not. Waiting is where most of the living happens, and it turns out waiting is where most of the trusting happens too.

Trusting God when the answer comes fast is not really trust. It is relief. Trust is what you do when the answer has not come yet and you decide to stay anyway. To keep showing up for therapy. To keep praying even when the prayers feel thin. To keep believing that slow is still moving.

Recovery taught me that in the body first. Nerves heal slowly. The brain rewires slowly. The plateau that scares so many survivors is usually not an ending, just a season where the progress goes quiet. Faith works the same way. Quiet is not the same as gone.

What Waiting on God Actually Looks Like

The old words for this are beautiful. Isaiah 40:31 says that those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength, that they will run and not grow weary, walk and not faint. I used to read that as a promise about the end of the waiting. Now I read it as a promise about the middle. The strength shows up during the wait, not after it.

Here is what waiting on God has looked like for me, in plain terms:

• Doing the next small thing. One exercise. One phone call. One page. Waiting with your hands busy is easier than waiting with your hands wrung.
• Saying the honest prayer. "God, I am tired of this" is a prayer. The Psalms are full of prayers exactly that blunt.
• Letting someone sit with you. Waiting alone at two in the morning is a different animal than waiting with a friend on the phone at two in the afternoon.
• Marking what has already come. Not to pretend everything is fine, but to remember that some prayers you prayed six months ago have quietly been answered.

None of this is dramatic. That is the point. Trust is built out of small, repeated, undramatic decisions.

When the Waiting Gets Long

There will be stretches when you cannot feel God in it at all. When the prayers seem to hit the ceiling and fall back down. I have written elsewhere about that dry, empty-feeling season, and I will say here what I said there. Dryness is not disqualification. Some of the most faithful people who ever lived went through long stretches of silence.

Psalm 27 ends with a line I have leaned on hard. Wait for the Lord. Be strong, and take heart, and wait for the Lord. Notice what it does not say. It does not say wait cheerfully. It does not say wait without questions. It says be strong and take heart, which tells me the writer knew that waiting takes strength and costs heart.

Trust is not a feeling you wait for. It is a direction you keep walking.

If the waiting has made you angry, say so. God is not fragile. If the waiting has made you doubt, bring the doubt with you instead of leaving the room. In my experience, the people whose faith survives the long wait are not the ones who never struggled. They are the ones who struggled out loud, in company, and stayed.

Slow Is Still Moving

One thing my recovery keeps teaching me is that healing rarely announces itself. You do not feel your brain rewiring. You just notice one day that a word came easier, that the stairs took less out of you, that you laughed without thinking about it. Healing is not a straight line, and neither is faith. Both of them wander. Both of them double back. Both of them are still going somewhere.

So measure differently. Do not ask, am I healed yet. Ask, am I still in this. Did I do today what today asked of me. Did I let anyone love me this week. Those are waiting-season questions, and yes counts for a lot more than it looks like.

For the One Waiting Tonight

Maybe you are reading this from a hospital chair, or from the bed you have been stuck in, or in the quiet after everyone else fell asleep. I do not know what you are waiting for. Movement in a hand. Words. A scan result. The old version of someone you love. I will not promise you a date, because nobody honest can.

But I can tell you what I have found to be true. The waiting did not mean God had forgotten me. Some of what I was waiting for came. Some came differently than I asked. And somewhere in the middle of the long wait, I stopped only wanting the answer and started wanting the One I was waiting with. That change did not erase the hard days. It gave me somewhere to put them.

Wait for the Lord. Be strong, take heart. And in the meantime, do the next small thing. That is not a consolation prize. As far as I can tell, that is what trust has always looked like.