Still Waiting for Something God Promised You?

Another friend got engaged this weekend. Another baby announcement in the group chat, the ultrasound photo with the little heart. Another person from your old job got the promotion you've been praying about for a year. You tap the heart because you mean it. You really are happy for them. And then you put the phone face-down and feel the ache you don't have a good name for.

You've been waiting a long time. Maybe you felt like God told you something years ago, about a marriage or a child or a door opening, and you've held onto it. But it's been so long now that you're starting to wonder if you made it up. If you heard wrong. If the promise had an expiration date nobody mentioned.

I want to tell you about a 75-year-old man with no kids. God speaks to Abram in Genesis 12 and says, "Go from your country, your relatives, and your father's house, to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation." A great nation. From a man whose wife could not have children, who was already old enough that the whole idea sounded almost unkind.

And Abram went. That's the whole verse. "So Abram went, as Yahweh had spoken to him." He didn't get a map. He got "the land that I will show you." He packed up his wife, his nephew, everything he owned, and walked toward a place he'd never seen because of a promise he couldn't see either.

When he arrives in Canaan, the story says something quietly honest: "The Canaanites were in the land at that time." Someone else was already living there. God appears and says, "I will give this land to your offspring," which is a lovely thing to say to a man with no offspring, standing in a land that belongs to someone else. So what does Abram do? He builds an altar. Then he moves on, pitches a tent, builds another altar, and calls on the name of the Lord.

He didn't hold his son for another twenty-five years. Twenty-five. He built altars in a land he didn't own, worshiping a God whose promise looked, from the outside, like it wasn't going anywhere. And still he kept pitching his tent one stop further along the road.

I don't know how long your wait will be, and I won't pretend the waiting isn't hard. But I can tell you the waiting is not proof that God forgot. Abram's wait was long, and the promise was true the entire time. A promise delayed is not a promise withdrawn. Maybe the altar you build tonight, the small "I still trust you" with nothing in hand to show for it, is exactly what faith looks like in the middle of a promise that hasn't landed yet.

So put the phone down. Say the promise out loud, even if your voice shakes. Then pitch your tent one more day. He has not lost the way to you.