Just. You. Wait: Patience, Contentment, and Hope for the Everyday by Tricia Lott Williford

It’s so hard to wait—for physical healing, for a relationship breakthrough, or for a dream to come true. For things to finally be the way they should, the way we pine for them to be.

A sister waits as she passes one year without contact with her estranged sibling. An author waits—he didn’t know it would be four years and counting since his last book was published. A couple waits five years between wanting a baby, adopting her, and then holding her in their arms. Our culture (and our internet) gets faster and faster, in sharp juxtaposition to the grinding snail’s pace of getting to where we want to be. At least the Israelites in the desert didn’t have 5G networks on their poky path to the promised land. They didn’t have the irony of accessing high-speed internet while making no-speed progress toward their goals. Wait, make that seemingly no-speed progress.

Because as author Tricia Williford Lott winsomely reminds us in this book, God is bustling behind the scenes, advocating for us, working for us, and producing spiritual gold from our waiting times. Lott is a warm, funny lady who has been through a terrible loss. Her husband died suddenly while they were in their 20s, leaving her to mourn and mother two small boys. Now remarried, Lott doesn’t gloss over the difficulty of waiting for something you want with your whole soul. She resists tying a big, fat spiritual bow on the reader’s pain; she never tells you how to feel.

So many things don’t add up to our human point of view, and we wonder if God has left us on life’s curb and sped off to attend to someone else’s dreams. But as Lott gently reassures us, God is with us now in all the confusion and impatience, and he is ahead of us, working out things in his own way.

This is a quiet, simple book studded with gemstone-bright insights—insights to mull over and absorb. For me, the gleaming insight was that God uses waiting as one of his favorite tools. He can make us more like him through waiting than he ever could by giving us what we want when we want it. Through the process of waiting, we are becoming, growing and developing into a stronger, braver, wiser version of who we were when we began to wait. And there are things we can do to wait well, to prepare ourselves for the awakening that it is to come. After all, Noah never stopped hammering while he waited—quite foolishly dry—for those first fat raindrops to fall.

“We can survive the wait with a handful of wildflowers named hope, courage, and laugh lines. There is wisdom in taking the steps you can take now and wisdom in waiting to know which steps to take,” Lott writes.

Life in 2019 doesn’t exactly cultivate patience, but this book, like the Bible and God himself, is wonderfully counter-cultural. When I closed the pages of Just. You. Wait., a shift had occurred. I knew in my heart that God was with me in my waiting, working, resolving, attending my hopes and needs. I knew in a deeper way that I was becoming someone new, and that my awakening was coming. Maybe not today, but someday, at the perfect time. (NavPress)