Waitng for a Change

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Waiting for a Change

“I can’t wait until this is over.”

Fill in the blank with your own personal “this.” Maybe it’s job loss, or being employed in a job you dread. Maybe it’s a health crisis for you or someone close to you. Maybe you’ve been experiencing traumatic family problems. Add a pandemic and a contentious election cycle and you’ve got a lot of people feeling like they can’t bear one more burden. Not one more.

The theme song for next year may be this: “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News” (yes, that is a song).

Nothing in life stays the same. This is great news when we’re waiting for change. This is not so great when it means suffering a continuous stream of problems and losses. Life is a series of rotations. We should be able to see this clearly by now.

What are you going through that seems unbearably hard right now? It’s not permanent, whatever it may be. Trial. Rotate. Calm. Rotate. Bomb drop. Rotate. Recovery. Rotate. What can a person do when things have been stressful for so long?

Pour out all your complaints before God. Be completely authentic because He knows anyway. You don’t have to pretend to be fine when you’re speaking God. Job understood this after his catastrophic losses, and he openly admitted to having bitterness in his soul:

“My soul is weary of my life; I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.” (Job 10:1)

It is possible to pray from a heart of suffering and still be respectful with God. How honest is it to say that you are tired of your life like it is, and to leave that complaint right out in the open, spoken transparently? Is it right to speak in the “bitterness of your soul”? It is right and it is real, but it is also temporary.

Pour out your complaints honestly and openly, but then go forward with confidence knowing that God has a change coming on your calendar. What is happening now is not how things will be forever. While you were reading this, the changes were beginning to take place. Eventually you will be able to say that this was a hard but beneficial period of learning, stretching, and growing. And then you’ll reach your hand back to someone else on a similar path and will be able to offer them genuine comfort.

Waiting for change is not easy, but it’s a reality that we all face. Aren’t you grateful that life rotates?

“Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4)