“[The Christian life] isn’t about mustering patience, but about experiencing God’s patience.” (Jeanie Shaw)
Inspired by Robin Daniels, The Virgin Eye, p. 372
To wait is to expect, and to expect is to wait
Do you like waiting? Amazon Prime has spoiled us. How do you feel when something doesn’t arrive when you expect it to? Annoying, perhaps, but not a big deal when it’s something you’ve ordered online. It’s rather different when we’re waiting for God to answer a prayer.
I’ve often wondered whether being expectant of God makes us impatient. But I’ve been rethinking that. Perhaps the problem isn’t expectation itself, but the kind of expectation we bring. Expectation without love makes us impatient; expectation rooted in love makes us willing to wait.
Let’s explore.
Love comes with expectations
If we share a relationship of love with anyone, it comes with expectations — and a willingness to wait. Two weeks after meeting Penny, I knew we’d get married and it became an expectation. But I also knew there was no chance that was going to happen until she’d finished her medical degree, which at that point was four years away. I didn’t like waiting, but I was willing. The expectation was part of the love we shared and part of the willingness to wait. Expectations are not the opposite of love, but one of its expressions. The question is never whether love has expectations — it always does — but what we do while we wait for them to be met.
Why we wait
We wait because love respects the other person’s freedom to give. If they do not give freely, they do not give in love. If they give according to my timetable and not theirs, I am not receiving a gift but exercising control. Control and love are inimical to one another.
Pressure changes the nature of giving. What might have been freely offered can become something extracted. To be expectant and impatient is to create an unsafe dynamic in a relationship. Love is squeezed out. The other person might still give us what we asked for. But there’s a difference between something freely given and something we’ve pressured someone into giving. Of course, our relationship with God isn’t identical to our relationships with one another. But the principle holds. Love doesn’t seek to control the one it loves.
Robin Daniels makes the same point in another way when he calls gentleness a tutor. Gentleness, he says, “allows our neighbour to respond to us in their own time, in their own way, without control or manipulation.” Love makes room for the other person to respond. Control shrinks the room.
Covenant love
To be expectant and willing to wait is an expression of covenant love. We see this in our relationship with God, in marriage, and in any relationship that matters to us. Marriage is where most of us learn it most concretely. Two people bind themselves to one another, hold real expectations of each other, and learn, over a lifetime, to give one another time.
The Bible often speaks of God’s love in terms of hesed, a Hebrew word associated with steadfast love, faithfulness, and covenant loyalty. This is a love that isn’t a response to good performance. As Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks put it in The Other Half of Church, ‘a main characteristic of hesed love is that it can survive bad performance and bad character.’
If God’s love isn’t dependent on our performance, we don’t have to earn the right to wait in his presence. We can come to him honestly, with our hopes and disappointments, and remain in relationship with him.
Four scriptures for waiting hearts
Habakkuk 2.2–3 — the vision that will surely come
“Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it.
For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.”
Expectation and patience coexisting. “If it seems to tarry, wait for it.” God’s vision has an appointed time. Even when it seems to delay, Habakkuk is told to wait for it. The promise is not abandoned simply because its fulfilment takes longer than expected.
Psalm 130 — waiting that hopes
A Song of Ascents.
Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD.
Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!
If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered.
I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem.
It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.
Waiting is not empty but attentive, “more than those who watch for the morning” — and its foundation is hesed. We can afford to wait for someone whose love will not run out.
Lamentations 3.19–33 — waiting for the LORD
The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”
The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for one to bear the yoke in youth,
to sit alone in silence when the Lord has imposed it,
to put one’s mouth to the dust (there may yet be hope),
to give one’s cheek to the smiter, and be filled with insults.
For the Lord will not reject forever.
Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.
The steadfast love that is “new every morning” is given to people in a long season of waiting, and it is that love which produces the confidence: “The LORD is good to those who wait for him.” Waiting isn’t necessarily wasted time. Even in the waiting, we can discover something of God’s faithfulness.
Luke 2.25–32 — Simeon. He waited and saw.
Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
Simeon is expectant and patient at one and the same time. He keeps coming to the temple, looking, waiting. He does not control the promise, he receives it — and holds the promised child in his arms. Anna waited too, worshipping night and day.
Of course, waiting doesn’t mean that God will fulfil every expectation exactly as we hope. Some prayers seem to go unanswered, and some longings remain with us for years. We cannot use love as a formula for getting what we want from God. What love gives us is something deeper: The freedom to keep asking, the patience to keep trusting, and the assurance that even when we don’t understand what God is doing, we are not abandoned.
God waits for us
God also knows how to wait. He invites us to respond to him, but he doesn’t force our love or rush our growth. He gives us room to choose, to struggle, and to learn to be present with him. As Nathan Foster puts it, “patiently he waits for us to choose to be present.”[^1] That is the model for how we are to love Him and pray to Him. If God gives us that kind of space, perhaps we need to learn to give him our trust without demanding that he act on our timetable, and to give one another the same freedom.
Praying with expectation, waiting with hope
Therefore we pray with expectation and we wait with hope — one combined attitude, not two moods that alternate. Love allows us to expect, but it doesn’t give us the right to dictate. We can bring our longings to God with confidence without turning those longings into demands.
When we expect without patience, we try to take God’s place. When we wait without expectation, we lose sight of the God to whom we’re praying. The first makes us tyrants; the second leaves us orphans. The gospel makes us children — free to ask and free to wait, secure in the love of a Father who gives in his own time and in his own way. And this patience is not something we manufacture; as Jeanie Shaw puts it, the Christian life “isn’t about mustering patience, but about experiencing God’s patience.”[^2]
Questions for reflection
- Where are you expecting something from God — impatiently or expectantly?
- Is there a relationship where your expectancy has morphed into pressure?
- Where do you need to receive God’s patience rather than manufacture your own?
Your brother, Malcolm
October 2026
[^1]: “The Cure for Distraction: Staying present through intentional slowing” – Renovare article July 24, 2018 (orig. 2014), https://renovare.org/articles/the-cure-for-distraction
[^2]: The Inside of the Cup, pp. 16–17. Jeanie Shaw
