What's worth waiting for?

There are seasons when life does not unfold in an orderly line but collapses into a single, disorienting moment—when events pile up faster than our ability to process them, when the ground seems to move and we are left wondering where, exactly, we now stand. In such moments, beneath the scramble to respond and the effort to remain composed, a quieter question begins to rise. It does not shout, but it refuses to leave: What is actually worth waiting for?

To approach that question, I want to bring into conversation two passages of Scripture—one from the prophet Isaiah, one from the Psalms—not because they echo each other in obvious ways, but because together they expose something profound about the way we inhabit our lives. Isaiah lifts our eyes and asks, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might He increases strength… Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength.” (Isa 40:28-31)

The Psalmist, Solomon—renowned for wisdom, though not always for the way he embodied it—speaks in a different register: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil… for He gives to His beloved sleep.” (Ps 127:1-2)

At first, these passages may appear to sit in different worlds: Isaiah’s soaring, almost liturgical declaration of who God is, and the Psalm’s grounded reflection on work, security, and the shape of an ordinary day. Yet, if you linger with them, you begin to hear that they are, in fact, tracing two versions of the same human story—or better, unveiling that two stories are always running alongside one another, and each of us is, often without realizing it, living inside one of them.

I was reminded of this not in the stillness of a study or a sanctuary, but in the cramped interior of a bus on a highway in the Middle East. It was during a recent journey that seemed to be framed, almost theatrically, by conflict—a trip that began just as tensions escalated and ended just as a fragile calm was announced. The day after I arrived in Dubai, everything ignited. The day before I left, a ceasefire was declared. To some, it almost became a joke: I arrived with war and departed with peace. But the moment that stayed with me was not dramatic in that way. It was smaller, more ordinary, and therefore more revealing.

We were somewhere between Sharjah and the Oman border when it happened, the bus pushing its way through late-evening traffic, the desert light pouring in through streaked windows. The vehicle itself was meant for thirty-eight people, but there were forty-six of us wedged into that narrow tube of metal and vinyl—knees angled sideways, shoulders pressed together, bags balanced on laps, the faint smell of sweat and fabric and dust lingering in the warm air. Conversations rose and fell in a blend of languages, the quiet tapping of thumbs on screens filling in the spaces between words. We were simply in transit, all of us, carried forward by a route someone else had set.

Then every phone on that bus screamed at once.

It was not a gentle chime, but the harsh, insistent wail of an emergency alert, a sound that seized the room. Pockets lit up, screens flashed, hands fumbled to pull devices free. For a moment there was only noise and light, a sudden storm inside that cramped, moving space.

And then the words appeared on our screens: “Seek immediate shelter… potential missile threat… await further instructions.”

The bus shuddered forward a few feet and then lurched to another halt, hemmed in by cars and trucks. Take cover—but where? There was no building to run into, no shelter to duck beneath, only a strip of asphalt stretching into the haze and a thin shell of metal around us. I became acutely aware of how exposed we were: the large windows, the narrow aisle, the sheer number of bodies with nowhere to go. The sound of the alert faded, and a strange, heavy silence settled in its place. The usual hum of conversation vanished. You could hear the engine, the faint rattle in the ceiling, the whisper of the air conditioner struggling against the heat. Faces were turned toward screens, toward the sky, toward nothing in particular, as fear quietly took its seat among us.

And then, from somewhere near the middle of the bus, came the sound that did not belong.

Laughter.

High, clear, bubbling up in waves—a child’s laughter, unrestrained and unselfconscious. Heads turned. Brows furrowed. A few tight smiles appeared, the kind that say, “You don’t understand what is happening.” But the boy was not laughing at now. His small body was angled toward his father, his hands gripping the edge of an iPad. On the screen, a bright, animated world unfolded—characters tumbling, colors flashing, music spilling out in tinny bursts. His eyes were locked onto that world. The missile alert, the stillness of the adults, the invisible threat above us—none of that framed his reality. Another story did.

Nothing about the danger outside had changed. The risk remained exactly what it had been when the alert first arrived. And yet, in that overfull bus, two entirely different worlds were being lived at the same time. For most of us, the story was one of threat, fragility, and waiting for worse news. For one small boy, it was a story of wonder and play and “coming soon” scenes on a screen he could not wait to see.

Sitting there, between the silence and the laughter, I realized: the story you are plugged into will decide the world you feel, even when you are sitting in the same seat. And that realization presses a deeper question into our own lives: What are you actually hoping for? What is the story you are waiting for? Which “coming soon” narrative quietly shapes your days—the one that trains you to expect only more threat, or the one that teaches you to wait for the Lord, to live as though His kingdom is, even now, drawing near?

Isaiah gives voice to that question in his own way. He looks at a people whose hopes have sagged under the weight of exile and disappointment, and he asks, almost incredulously: “Have you not known? Have you not heard?” He is speaking to men and women who have begun to interpret their lives through the story of abandonment, who are saying in their hearts, “My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God.” Into that narrative, Isaiah announces a different one: “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary… He gives power to the faint… those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.”

Isaiah, then, is not merely correcting bad theology; he is exposing a rival story. His people have begun to live as though they are alone on that highway, as though the only script available to them is threat, exhaustion, and quiet abandonment. Psalm 127 steps in alongside Isaiah and names that story with unsettling clarity: it is the story of anxious toil—rising early, lying down late, building and guarding and planning as if everything finally depends on you. It looks responsible, even admirable, but it is powered by the same inner script: “No one else is really watching over this. If I stop, it all falls apart.” Over against that, Scripture holds out another way of living: not passive, but rooted; not frantic, but faithful; not driven by the next alert, but anchored in the character of the Lord who builds, who watches, who gives sleep to His beloved. Between these two stories—anxious toil and trusting rest—every one of us is quietly choosing, day after day, which world we will inhabit.

That choice is not abstract. It is bound up with what we are secretly waiting for. All of us carry “coming soon” narratives in our hearts—pictures of a future that will finally make it all worth it. For some, it is the promotion, the relationship, the move, the financial cushion, the recognition. For others, it is simpler: just a little less pressure, a little more safety, a life that hurts a bit less than it does now. These hoped-for futures are not wrong in themselves, but they have a way of becoming ultimate. They start to function as our true gospel: when that arrives, then I will live, then I will rest, then I will be whole. And without noticing, we begin to live as though the real “coming soon” in our story is whatever we can engineer, rather than the coming of the Lord Himself.

This is what gives Paul’s words such force. Before he met Christ, he lived inside a powerful “coming soon” narrative of his own. He was on a trajectory of religious achievement and social standing, climbing toward a future in which his name would carry weight and his record would speak for itself. But when the risen Jesus interrupts his story, Paul looks back over everything he had been waiting for and says, “Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss… I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” The future he was living for changed. The horizon moved. His “coming soon” was no longer a life of flawless performance and human approval; it was a Person—Christ Himself—and a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Notice how he speaks about it: “Not that I have already obtained this… but I press on… forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.” He is not describing a man who has arrived; he is describing a man whose hope has been re-aimed. His energy, his perseverance, his courage in suffering are not driven by a vague determination to “do better,” but by a very concrete expectation: there is a day coming when he will see the One who laid hold of him, and every hidden act of faithfulness, every unseen surrender, every costly “yes” to Jesus will not have been in vain. He lives now in light of that day.

The writer of Hebrews gathers this same thread and hands it to us. “We are surrounded,” he says, “by so great a cloud of witnesses”—men and women who, in their own generations, refused to let the loudest story define them. They endured ridicule, hardship, waiting, and sometimes loss, because they were looking for “a better country,” a city whose architect and builder is God. Their lives were oriented toward a “coming soon” they could not yet see but would not release. And so the call comes: “Let us lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance… looking to Jesus.”

To look to Jesus is not just to remember His example; it is to live in the awareness that He is present and active with us now, and to run as those who are being led, strengthened, and sustained by the One who walks beside us and is bringing us to Himself—to become, by grace, as He is, and to share in His work of making all things new in His new creation. We are not straining toward a distant finish line while He waits on the other side, cheering us on from afar. We are being drawn forward by the living Christ who has already gone ahead of us, who is with us by His Spirit, and who is even now weaving our faltering obedience into His larger work of renewing all things.

This is where biblical waiting and our everyday hopes either collide or harmonize. Waiting, in Scripture, is not the tired drift of resignation. It is the steady, deliberate alignment of our lives with the story of God’s promised future. To wait on the Lord is to let His “coming soon” define all the lesser ones—to hold open-handed the promotions and relationships and opportunities of this life, while gripping with both hands the promise that Christ will come, that His kingdom will fill the earth, that every tear will be wiped away, that righteousness and peace will finally be at home here. It is to rehearse, in prayer and obedience and worship, the reality that the truest thing about our future is not what we achieve, but who is coming.

That does not mean we stop planning or building or working. Psalm 127 does not abolish labour; it relocates it. It invites us to build as those whose hope is not in the building, to watch as those whose security is not in the watch, to sleep as those whose future does not rest on their own vigilance. It invites us to step out of the story where the only “coming soon” is the next crisis or the next accomplishment, and into the story where the deepest “coming soon” is Jesus and his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven – new creation.

So let me ask you very simply: What are you living for right now? When your mind drifts into the future, what are you secretly counting on to make everything finally okay? What headline are you waiting to see, what email, what message, what deposit, what diagnosis, what change in circumstance? And if that never came, or if it came and did not satisfy the way you imagined, would your story collapse—or would there still be a deeper hope carrying you?

Because one way or another, we are all waiting. We are all orienting our lives around a “soon” that we believe is on its way. For some, it is the next threat: the next downturn, the next conflict, the next loss. The heart braces itself and lives as if disaster is the only thing that truly keeps its promises. For others, it is the next success: the next opportunity, the next achievement, the next affirmation. The heart spends itself chasing the glow of a future that, when it finally arrives, always seems to ask for just a little more. But for those who wait on the Lord, there is another way. Our “coming soon” is the faithful God who does not grow weary, the risen Christ who has promised to come again, the Spirit-wrought kingdom that is already breaking into the present and will one day be all in all.

That is why Isaiah can say, “Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” Strength is not given in advance to those who secure all outcomes; it is given along the way to those who stake their lives on God’s future. They are not spared all hardship, but they are carried through it. Their steps may be slow, but they are not finally swallowed by exhaustion or despair, because their story does not end with the alerts of this age. It ends with the appearing of Christ and the renewal of all things.

So today, the invitation is both searching and simple: to name honestly the “coming soon” narratives that have been quietly discipling your heart, and to bring them into the presence of the One who alone can bear the weight of your hope. It is to ask, perhaps for the first time in a long while, “Lord, I want my deepest waiting to be for You. Teach me to live as though Your coming is the truest future of my life—Your coming as the enthroned, rightful King of Your kingdom on earth, where Your will is done and Your reign is gladly received.” And then, from that place, to go on building, working, loving, and serving—not as those who labour in vain, but as those whose story is caught up in His.

For those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall rise. They shall endure. They shall walk—and not faint.