God, Will Your Promises Come True Today?
Part 1: The Long Wait of Abraham and Sarah
We all wait upon God. Finding a husband or wife. Waiting for a baby. The repair of a marriage. The return of a wayward son or daughter. Healing from illness. Finding a church. Getting a job. Applying for something. Completing a project. Finishing school. Selling or buying a house. The list goes on and on.
It got me to thinking of times in the Bible when people waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. A day finally arrived -- and then waiting, hope, and prayer gave forth the fulfillment of God’s promises.
Abraham and Sarah waited.
We often connote waiting with Abraham and Sarah and the years they waited for a son. People usually describe the duration as 25 years, representing the time from when God promised a son to when the son arrived. In reality, Abraham and Sarah waited decades longer.
We glean this from the Bible and how the inability to “be fruitful and multiply” weighed on their hearts. Before promising “a son,” God vowed to give Abraham (age 75) a “great reward.” Ponder Abraham’s immediate response: “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me, since I remain childless . . . You have given me no children.” The raw honesty shows the decades of anguish Abraham and Sarah had already experienced.
The Bible does not mention when Abraham and Sarah married. We know their son married at 40. If we assume Abraham married at the same age, that adds another 35 years of waiting. Extrapolating, Abraham and Sarah waited approximately sixty years (around 35 years prior to God’s promise and another 25 years after God’s promise) -- approximately 21,900 days until their son’s birth. Abraham was 100 and Sarah 90.
The world said it was impossible, but “with God, all things are possible.”
A personal story.
When I think of waiting, I think of our family friends. They spent two years fostering, loving, and caring for a newborn who became a toddler. They wanted to adopt the child.
Along the way, the Lord provided God-incidents strengthening their adoption hopes. Some occurred through the family’s wide prayer network across the United States.
Our family witnessed such a God-incident while visiting a Walmart in West Virginia. As a woman handled our return, somehow the conversation turned to God, foster care, and adoption. The Walmart Lady, as we affectionately call her, described the challenges she and her husband encountered with the foster care system. She explained that despite unsurmountable obstacles, they “kept fighting for the children,” and ultimately God provided a path toward adoption.
The Walmart Lady had a message for our friends: “tell them to keep fighting for that baby.” Walking out, I realized there had been nothing “random” about the interaction between two strangers connected by God in His desire to encourage a foster family 1,000 miles away.
Our friends needed the many God-incidents, for their path has not been easy. The foster care system, focused on metrics instead of children, ignored warning signs, cut corners, and inexplicably returned the baby to the birth mother, who had failed to meet required standards.
Although devastated, our friends have not lost trust in God. They firmly root their “hope in the Lord.”
The Walmart lady represented one of many chance encounters. The most astonishing (so far) -- a pizza delivery guy who walked past our friends and recited a Bible verse, “God said, ‘Do not touch my anointed ones.’” It seems the steeper the adoption road, the more astonishing the God-incidents answer in return. Our friends steadfastly pray and wait.
Originally, the previous paragraph marked a stopping point for this story. However, before finishing the article, we ran into the Walmart Lady again!
Over Memorial Day weekend, we hurried out of the same Walmart when our son asked, “should we look for the Walmart Lady?” Running late for an appointment, we had searched many other times without finding her, but his question convicted me. I paused to quickly look around. And, then I saw her nearby -- our Walmart Lady! We caught her up on the foster child. With certitude, she repeated the message from the previous year, “tell them to fight for the child,” and “he will come back to them.” She promised to pray. Stunned, we left Walmart and called our friends to relay hope only God could have engineered. Quietly, I thanked the Lord that I had listened to our son.
My friends know there will come a day when God’s promises come true. So, trusting God’s timing for the child’s return, the family plan a future visit to a West Virginia town, where they will introduce the little boy to the Walmart Lady — a special woman used mightily by God.
The world says it is impossible, but “with God, all things are possible.”
Charles H. Spurgeon (1834 - 1892)
If the Lord Jehovah makes us wait, [then] blessed are all . . . that wait for Him.
He is worth waiting for. The waiting itself is beneficial to us [for]
it tries faith, exercises patience . . . and endears the blessing when it comes.
The Lord’s people have always been a waiting people.
This is the first in a three-part series.
