I know most of us despise this word. It is so hard to be patient. I have a two-year old daughter and some days I feel like she may never learn it! It is the hardest thing in the world for us to learn, especially when we have no control. A good friend of mine asked me to write on this subject and boy is she about to get it! Just Kidding!

Throughout the Bible we see that we are not alone when it comes to having to learn patience. Patience is something that MUST be learned, most of the time it is not just given to us. One example I gained from during this study has been Abraham and Sarah. They were so old, in their nineties, and God had promised them children. Now, here is a couple facing infertility issues, yet they did know they would eventually get pregnant. How comforting that must have been compared to many situations today when couples have no idea if they ever will get pregnant. But what did our great forefather do? Sarah came up with her own little plan, to have her husband sleep with the maidservant and have a child that way! No patience to wait on God.

In my own experience I dated my husband for six and a half years before we married. We did not live like unmarried couples today and live together beforehand. It humors me and saddens me how many young girls are living with their boyfriends today, even working hard to pay most all the bills, and they think they will get a ring and proposal sooner??? The real key is to abstain from all sexual behavior and all financial support until marriage and I bet he will have marriage on his mind a lot sooner! Anyways, we waited for that long to get married. Why did we wait? Well, we knew the timing was not right. We both wanted to go to college and we knew we must have substantial jobs because we wanted to live under our own roof, not our parents. We worked hard through that time to reach our goals so that we could get married. It was so hard when many of our friends would pop up and get engaged after just a few months of dating, and here we were struggling to wait! Jealousy and impatience took its toll on us many times.

I know there are many couples that are “waiting” on God’s timing either on marriage, having a baby, buying a house, or many other things. It is hard to wait even when you know that it WILL happen one day, just like Abraham and Sarah. I know how anxious the time is while waiting. Josh and I sat down four years ago with his degree requirements class list when he enrolled in Seminary. We mapped out the next four years of what classes he was to take and when. We decided that he would take his time in seminary, not rush through it and really gain from every professor. That is why we wanted to move to the seminary and not just enroll in on-line courses. I remember feeling so discouraged thinking about how long it was going to take, after all four years is a lifetime, right? It is now the dawn of his last semester and invitations went out last week in the mail to our family. We cannot believe how fast the time flew by? Where did it go? How faithful were we to God during the four years? Was it successful? Did we read enough? Did we make enough relationships? It is so amazing that four years seems like a few months now that it is over! The same was with our wedding night. Our entire honeymoon in Aruba was spent pondering the past six and a half years and how fast it seemed to go by, and now that the wait was over, we realized how much fun we had six and a half years of dating. Now that we have been married for five years, and every bit of it has been with financial struggles, we cannot date like we did before we were married. We truly dated those years. Every weekend we went to baseballs games, nice restaurants, movies, plays, youth events, preaching conferences, and much more! We can not do many of those things now due to working, child-raising, school, and money.

James said life is but a vapor, so we should never look at a day as a stumbling block. Each day we are here is a gift from God. Each day is very valuable to a Christian. We should never view times of waiting as misery. We should focus on each day at a time and we appreciate it more when we finally get what we have been wanting. This is a secret to most couples in the same predicament of having to wait to get married, it is not a predicament at all, but rather a privilege. A good marriage is not something we can purchase, if so we would be in a lot of trouble. God knew that for us, we would not have been able to enjoy the dating like we did had we gotten married sooner. We would not have started our marriage out on the foot we did with already knowing each other so well. We truly appreciated one another after the wedding because we had been waiting for it for so long.

Good things come to those who wait! That is not in Scripture, but it is a good principle to grasp. We know that God’s timing is PERFECT, He is never late nor early for anything. Since God is perfect and just , then each day He has us wait on something, it is for our own good.

Romans 8:28 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to [his] purpose.”