Readers Note:
Today’s reflection is from my husband, G. Wray. He has a way of finding Christ in the ordinary places of life. This time, He showed up somewhere he knows well: at the end of a fishing line. I hope you enjoy Beneath the Surface.
One of the things I love most about Jesus is the way He revealed eternal truths through ordinary things.
Seeds.
Sheep.
Bread.
Fishing nets.
He taught people to see the Kingdom in the ordinary. I’ve begun to think waiting is no different.
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One of the most repeated invitations in Scripture is simply this:
“Wait on the Lord.”
I’ve heard those words most of my life. For years, I heard them as, “Be patient. God will answer in His time.”
There is certainly truth in that. But I’ve come to see that waiting isn’t really about the passing of time. It’s about the placing of trust.
A fisherman understands that. That’s why they call it fishing and not catching.He casts his line into water that hides everything from his sight. Then he waits. Not because he expects nothing to happen, but because he trusts that sometehing is happening beneath the surface.
Anyone who cooks on a smoker learns the same lesson. You can’t rush it. Opening the lid every few minutes doesn’t help. The meat is changing in ways you cannot yet see.
Parents understand it too. When our children are young, we wait for their first steps and first words. As they mature, we find ourselves waiting for something much harder—wisdom, maturity, healing. We pray, we encourage, and sometimes all we can do is trust that God is working in places we cannot reach.
David understood that kind of waiting. He had been anointed king, yet spent years hiding in caves while Saul hunted him. God’s promise hadn’t changed, but David’s circumstances certainly had.
Still, he could say,
“I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.”
Then, almost as if reminding his own heart, he wrote,
“Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait, I say, on the LORD.”
—Psalm 27:13–14
That isn’t resignation.
It’s trust.
As I sat with those words, another picture came into focus. The Hebrew word translated wait carries an ancient picture of a cord—strands twisted together under tension until they become strong.
Then I remembered the fisherman holding his line. And I thought of the writer of Hebrews:
“We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.”
—Hebrews 6:19
A line.
A cord.
An anchor.
They are all telling the same story.
A cord gains its strength as its strands are drawn together and twisted under tension. Waiting does something similar in us.
The tension we feel while waiting—the unanswered prayer, the uncertainty, the thing we cannot yet see—is not pulling our hope apart. It the hands of God, that tension can draw the strands tighter, strengthening our trust in the One we have fastened our lives to.
Strand by strand.
Trust upon trust.
But even a strong cord must be fastened to something secure. Tie it to something weak, and eventually what it holds can give way.
Tie it to the Rock, and our security rests not in how tightly we can hold on, but in the One to whom we are fastened.
When I look back upon my life, I can see that God has been weaving that cord through my life all along.
Every answered prayer.
Every answer that took longer than I hoped.
Every season of waiting.
Every disappointment that eventually revealed His faithfulness.
Every unexpected provision.
Strand by strand, He has been weaving hope into places where fear once lived. What began as something I held onto has slowly become part of who I am.
The fisherman leaves his line in the water because he trusts what he cannot yet see.
Parents keep praying because they trust the God who loves their children even more than they do.
And we wait on the Lord because our hope is not fastened to an outcome. It is fastened to a Person.
Jesus Christ.
He is the Rock.
He is the Anchor.
He is, as Paul writes, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
Waiting on the Lord isn’t simply learning to be patient. It is learning, day by day, to fasten our lives to Christ, trusting that even when His work is hidden beneath the surface, His faithfulness never is.
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©️ G. Wray. All rights reserved.
I so loved this and so much Godly wisdom. These are all gifts from the Lord...patience, hope, trust, belief and grace. A journey that is with us until we take our last breath and this journey is such a journey of love. Walking with the Lord, speaking to the Lord and holding on to His goodness and love for us.
Great examples of waiting. We aren’t waiting because we expect nothing to happen. We are waiting because we trust the process. That’s so good. Thanks for sharing!