The curtains were still in their nylon. That was the first thing I noticed when I visited Usman’s flat in Jos. He had moved in twenty-two months earlier, two rooms and a small kitchen off Rayfield Road, and his mother had bought him a set of heavy blue curtains as a housewarming gift. They lay folded on top of a carton in the corner of the sitting room, still sealed in the plastic from the market. The windows were covered with old wrappers held up by nails.
He slept on a mattress on the floor. There was no bed frame, no wardrobe, and only one plastic chair, which he insisted I take while he sat on the carton. “There’s no point buying furniture,” he explained. “I’ll be leaving soon.”
Usman was thirty-one, a hospital pharmacist, and almost two years earlier he had begun the process of relocating to work in the United Kingdom. He had passed his English test with a high score. A recruitment agency had taken his documents. Every stage had been completed, and now he was waiting on the final approvals. Every morning before work he checked his email. Every evening he checked it again.
As we talked, it became clear that the curtains were not the only thing on hold. He had stepped back from the men’s fellowship at church because, as he put it, he would not be around long enough to commit. He had declined when his pastor asked him to help with the youth ministry. He had been in a relationship with a young woman named Binta for four years, and he had not proposed, because he wanted to “settle abroad first”. At the hospital, he did the minimum. When the chief pharmacist asked him to help train the new interns, he said he would rather not start something he could not finish.
“So what are you doing with this season?” I asked him.
He laughed, then stopped laughing. “Waiting,” he said.
Living in the waiting room
Many of us know what it is like to live in a waiting room. We are waiting for a visa, a job offer, a spouse, a child, an admission letter, a healing, a contract, a building, a breakthrough. The thing we are waiting for is often good. The desire for it may well be from God. And while we wait, we can slowly stop living.
The danger of waiting is not only that it is painful. It is that we suspend our obedience until the future takes the shape we hoped for. We stop investing in the present because we have decided it is temporary. We will serve when we are settled. We will commit when we know where we will be. We will give when the money comes in. We will love properly when the circumstances are right. The present becomes a corridor between the life we had and the life we want, and corridors are not places where people build anything.
Solomon saw this long ago. “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap” (Ecclesiastes 11:4). A farmer who waits for perfect conditions before he plants will never plant at all. There is always a reason to wait a little longer. And while he watches the sky, the planting season passes.
This teaching is about a different kind of patience. Biblical patience is not passive. It is not a sitting-still, a holding of breath until the future arrives. It is the steady, faithful living of the life that is in front of you, while you wait with hope for what God may yet do.
The farmer between the rains
James wrote to believers whose waiting was far harder than most of ours. Many of them were poor labourers, and in the verses just before this passage he describes rich landowners who had withheld their wages and condemned the innocent (James 5:4-6). Their waiting was for justice, and ultimately for the return of Christ. Listen to what he tells them:
Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned: behold, the judge standeth before the door. Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of the Lord, for an example of suffering affliction, and of patience. Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.
The word translated patient here is makrothumeo. It literally means to be long-tempered, the opposite of being short-tempered. It describes a person who can hold out for a long time without losing heart or lashing out.
James chooses a farmer as his picture, and the choice is deliberate. In the land of Israel, the “early rain” came in the autumn, softening the hard ground for ploughing and sowing. The “latter rain” came in the spring, swelling the grain before harvest. Between them lay months of winter. A farmer could do nothing to make the rain come. He could only wait for it.
But notice what kind of waiting this is. The farmer is not lying on a mat for six months. Between the rains he is ploughing, sowing, weeding, mending fences, guarding against animals and thieves, and preparing his threshing floor. His waiting is full of work. He cannot control the rain, so he gives himself to everything he can control. And he waits “for the precious fruit of the earth.” He values the harvest so much that he is willing to work faithfully through a season that produces nothing visible.
“Stablish your hearts,” James says. Make them firm. Waiting can make the heart unsteady, swinging between hope and despair with every piece of news. Patience involves settling the heart on what is certain: “the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.”
Then comes a very practical warning: “Grudge not one against another.” The Greek word means to groan or sigh against someone. Long waiting makes people irritable. Spouses snap at each other. Colleagues become bitter about those who seem to have received what they are still waiting for. James knows this, and he tells us to guard our relationships in the waiting.
Finally, he points to examples: the prophets, and Job. “Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord.” The word for patience here is different. It is hupomone, endurance, the ability to remain under a heavy load. And “the end of the Lord” means the outcome God brought about, the purpose He was working towards. James does not say that every sufferer’s story will end exactly as Job’s did. He says that Job’s story reveals something about the Lord Himself: “that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.” The ground of our patience is not a guaranteed outcome. It is the character of God.
PunchlineBiblical patience is not a suspended life. It is the farmer between the rains, working faithfully at everything he can control while he waits for what only God can send.
The anointed king went back to the sheep
David’s life gives us a striking picture of faithful waiting. When Samuel came to the house of Jesse and anointed him, David was a youth, and the oil was poured on him “in the midst of his brethren: and the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day forward” (1 Samuel 16:13). He had been chosen as Israel’s next king.
What happened next? He went back to the sheep. When Saul needed a musician to soothe him, his servants recommended David:
Wherefore Saul sent messengers unto Jesse, and said, Send me David thy son, which is with the sheep. And Jesse took an ass laden with bread, and a bottle of wine, and a kid, and sent them by David his son unto Saul. And David came to Saul, and stood before him: and he loved him greatly; and he became his armourbearer.
“Send me David thy son, which is with the sheep.” The anointed king was still minding his father’s flock. And even after he entered Saul’s service, we read: “But David went and returned from Saul to feed his father’s sheep at Beth-lehem” (1 Samuel 17:15). He moved between the palace and the pasture, doing whatever was in front of him.
David did not treat the sheep as beneath him because he had been anointed for something greater. He did not wait in his tent for the crown. And the faithfulness of those years mattered enormously. When he stood before Saul and offered to fight Goliath, his evidence was drawn entirely from the pasture: the lion and the bear that had come for the flock, and the God who had delivered him from both (1 Samuel 17:34-37). The skills, courage and trust he would need as a king were formed in the ordinary work he did while waiting to become one.
It would be many years before David actually took the throne, and some of those years were spent as a fugitive in caves and in the wilderness. The waiting was long and often bitter. But he never stopped living faithfully where he was. He served Saul with skill. He led his men. He refused to seize the throne by killing Saul, even when he had the opportunity. He let God bring the promise to pass in God’s time.
Is your anointing waiting for a palace? Go back to the sheep. Care for them well. You may find that the very work you are tempted to despise is the work that is preparing you for what comes next.
Faithful in a place he did not choose
Joseph’s waiting was even harder than David’s, because it was the result of injustice. Sold by his brothers, falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife, he ended up in an Egyptian prison for something he had not done. And yet:
But the LORD was with Joseph, and shewed him mercy, and gave him favour in the sight of the keeper of the prison. And the keeper of the prison committed to Joseph’s hand all the prisoners that were in the prison; and whatsoever they did there, he was the doer of it . The keeper of the prison looked not to any thing that was under his hand; because the LORD was with him, and that which he did, the LORD made it to prosper.
“Whatsoever they did there, he was the doer of it.” Joseph did not treat the prison as a waiting room. He became the most useful man in it. He took responsibility, worked diligently and served the other prisoners, including the king’s butler and baker, whose troubled faces he noticed one morning (Genesis 40:6-7). That attentiveness to other people in the middle of his own suffering is remarkable.
But notice something else, because it guards us from a false idea of patience. When Joseph interpreted the butler’s dream, he said: “But think on me when it shall be well with thee, and shew kindness, I pray thee, unto me, and make mention of me unto Pharaoh, and bring me out of this house” (Genesis 40:14). And he added, “here also have I done nothing that they should put me into the dungeon” (Genesis 40:15).
Joseph asked for help. He named the injustice. He used a legitimate opportunity to seek his release. Patience did not mean pretending his situation was acceptable or refusing to act. It meant serving faithfully while also pursuing what was right. The butler forgot him for two full years, and Joseph had to keep waiting. But he was not wrong to ask.
That matters for anyone waiting through an unjust situation: an unfair dismissal, a stalled court case, an inheritance withheld, a promotion blocked by favouritism. Patience does not require silence. You may pursue legal remedies, appeal to those with authority and speak up for yourself. What patience asks is that you keep living well while you do.
She departed not from the temple
Luke introduces us to a woman whose whole life was a waiting:
And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she was of a great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity; And she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem.
Anna had been married for only seven years before her husband died. Since then she had lived as a widow, and the KJV says she was “of about fourscore and four years.” Some read that as her age, some as the length of her widowhood, which would make her over a hundred. Either way, she had waited a very long time.
What she was waiting for was the redemption of Israel: the coming of the Messiah. It was a good hope, given by God through the prophets. And she did not suspend her life until it arrived. She “departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day.” Her waiting was her service. She worshipped, prayed and fasted, and Luke tells us she was a prophetess, so she was also speaking God’s word to others.
And when the moment came, when Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus into the temple, Anna was there. She did not have to be summoned from somewhere else. She was already in the place of faithfulness. She “gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem.” The waiting had connected her to a whole community of people who shared her hope.
I cannot promise that your waiting will end the way Anna’s did. Some faithful people die before seeing what they hoped for. But Anna shows us how to wait: in the presence of God, serving Him, connected to others, ready.
Diligence to the end
The writer of Hebrews spoke to believers who were growing sluggish in a long wait. He reminded them: “God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister” (Hebrews 6:10).
Notice the tenses. “Ye have ministered... and do minister.” Their service was not only in the past. They were still serving. And the writer wanted them to keep going: “we desire that every one of you do shew the same diligence to the full assurance of hope unto the end” (Hebrews 6:11). Hope is not a feeling that excuses inactivity. It is meant to fuel diligence all the way to the end.
Then he gives the warning: “That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises” (Hebrews 6:12). The word translated slothful is the same word he used a few verses earlier when he said they had become “dull of hearing” (Hebrews 5:11). It means sluggish, slow, lethargic. A long wait can make the soul sluggish. We lose our sharpness. We drift into a kind of spiritual hibernation. The writer calls us out of it.
Paul writes something similar to the Galatians, and there is a lovely detail in the Greek that the English hides. He says, “let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Galatians 6:9). Then in the next verse: “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men” (Galatians 6:10).
The word translated season in verse 9 and the word translated opportunity in verse 10 are the same Greek word, kairos. A fitting time. Paul is setting two times side by side. There is a kairos for reaping, and it is God’s: “in due season”, literally in its own time. And there is a kairos for doing good, and it is now: “as we have opportunity.” You cannot control the season of the harvest. But you are always living in the season of opportunity.
NuggetThat is the heart of faithful patience. The season of your breakthrough belongs to God. The season for kindness, service, diligence and love is the one you are standing in today.
First the blade, then the ear
There is another kind of waiting we have not yet mentioned, and it may be the hardest of all: waiting on our own growth. Many believers are impatient not only with their circumstances but with themselves. They want to be mature now, wise now, settled now. They look at friends from university who seem to have married, bought land, risen at work and grown spiritually, all by thirty, and they feel hopelessly behind.
Jesus told a short parable about this. A man casts seed into the ground, then sleeps and rises night and day, “and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear” (Mark 4:27-28).
Notice two things. First, the growth happens while the man is sleeping and rising, living his ordinary days. He cannot see it happening, and he does not know how it works. Second, the growth has stages. The blade comes before the ear, and the ear before the full corn. You cannot pull on a maize stalk to make it ripen faster. You will only uproot it.
That is a great comfort for anyone who feels slow. God’s work in you is real even when it is invisible, and it has an order. Paul was “confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). The work is His, and He will finish it. Isaiah says that “he that believeth shall not make haste” (Isaiah 28:16). Faith can afford to let things grow at the pace God has set.
Comparison is the enemy of that rest. Your friend’s harvest may have come early; yours may come later, or in a different field altogether. God is not running every life on the same calendar. The question is not whether you are where someone else is. It is whether you are faithfully tending what has been planted in you.
When waiting hurts
None of this means that waiting is easy, or that we should pretend it does not hurt. Scripture is honest about the pain. “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). David cried out, “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). If you are tired of waiting, you are in good company. Bring that tiredness to God in honest prayer. Lament is a form of faith.
Isaiah wrote to exiles who felt that God had forgotten them, and he gave them this promise:
He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
Notice the order at the end of verse 31. First they “mount up with wings as eagles”. Then they “run, and not be weary”. Then they “walk, and not faint”. We might have expected the order to rise, from walking to running to flying. But Isaiah ends with walking. There are seasons of soaring and seasons of running, but most of life is walking, the long, steady, unspectacular faithfulness of ordinary days. And God promises strength for that too. Sometimes the greatest miracle is not flying. It is not fainting.
Let me offer some practical wisdom for long seasons of waiting.
Make commitments proportionate to your situation, but make them. If you may relocate in six months, you can still serve in the church for six months. You can still be a good friend. You can still do your job with excellence. You can hang the curtains. If you leave, you will leave behind something good.
Plan for more than one outcome. Ask yourself what you would do if the thing you are waiting for comes next month, and what you would do if it never comes. A wise person can build a life that is faithful under both possibilities.
PunchlineKeep pursuing legitimate means. Patience does not mean you stop following up on the application, stop sending out your CV or stop seeing the doctor. Like Joseph, you may ask for help.
And watch your heart. Long waiting can slide into depression. If you find that you have lost interest in almost everything, that you are persistently low or hopeless, or that you cannot sleep or function, please speak to a doctor or a qualified counsellor as well as to a pastor. That is not a lack of faith. It is wise care for the life God has given you.
Usman hung the curtains the following Saturday. He sent me a photograph: the blue curtains drawn back from the window, the old wrappers in a heap on the floor. “Small thing,” he wrote. “But it felt like moving in.”
Over the next few months he did more than that. He bought a bed. He went back to the men’s fellowship. He told the chief pharmacist he would train the interns after all, and he found, to his surprise, that he enjoyed it. Two of them later told him he was the best teacher they had had.
He also had an honest conversation with Binta. He told her that he did not know whether the move would happen, or when, and that he had been using that uncertainty as a reason to delay committing to her. He asked whether she would be willing to build a life with him whichever way it went. She said yes. They were married in December, in her family’s compound in Bukuru.
As I write this, his application is still pending. It may be approved next month. It may not be approved at all. When I asked him recently how he felt about that, he shrugged. “If it comes, I’ll take the curtains down and give them to somebody,” he said. “Until then, they stay up. This is my house.”
Perhaps you are living in a waiting room. Perhaps the curtains are still in their nylon. The thing you are waiting for may be good, and God may yet give it to you. But do not wait to live. Go back to the sheep. Serve in the prison. Stay in the temple. Do good while you have opportunity. The season of harvest belongs to God, and the season of faithfulness belongs to you, and it is today.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- What are you waiting for at the moment? In what ways have you suspended your obedience until it arrives?
- How does the picture of the farmer between the rains change your understanding of patience?
- David went back to the sheep after he was anointed. What “sheep” in your life might you have been neglecting while you wait for something greater?
- Joseph asked the butler to remember him. Is there a legitimate step you should be taking in your situation instead of waiting passively?
- What would it look like for you to “hang the curtains” this week?
This Week
Identify one area of your life that you have put on hold while you wait for something. It might be a commitment at church, a relationship, a responsibility at work or a practical step at home. This week, take one concrete step to live fully in that area, as though you will be there for as long as God chooses. Then, each evening, read Galatians 6:10 and ask yourself: “What opportunity to do good did I have today, and did I take it?”
A Prayer
Father, my times are in Your hand. I bring You the things I am waiting for, and I confess that I have sometimes stopped living while I waited. Forgive me for treating my present life as a corridor. Teach me the patience of the farmer between the rains, faithful in everything I can do and trusting You for what only You can send. Give me the heart of David, who went back to the sheep, of Joseph, who served well in the prison, and of Anna, who never left Your presence. When the waiting hurts, let me bring my honest cry to You. Renew my strength, so that I may walk and not faint. And help me to do good today, while I have opportunity. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.