When God Feels Slow

A reflection on Advent, waiting, a painful job search, and continued hope deferred.

Photo by Andres F. Uran on Unsplash

One of my favorite traditions of the Christmas season is ending each night reading a few different Advent studies with Emily.

Advent reminds us that we live in the tension between what God has promised and what we’re still waiting to see. It names the reality that life is often lived in the middle — the not yet, the uncertain, the unfinished.

Truthfully, this is not exactly something I need to be “reminded” of. For the past several years — whether it be waiting on home repairs after our house was hit by a tornado, our nearly three years of infertility struggles, or simply waiting on life goals and dreams to come to fruition — waiting on God to deliver has been the reality in which Emily and I have lived every day.

This has been especially true these last few months after I was part of a major layoff at my company in early September. Since then, my days have been a mix of applications, hope, anticipation, and doing what I can to find work while I look for a full-time job. But that has also come with a lot of rejection, silence and quiet space I didn’t ask for. Life went from fast-paced to slow in a matter of minutes, and I’ve been trying to make sense of that shift ever since.

It may seem paradoxical that we welcome a season that purposely focuses on waiting. But the beauty of Advent is that it’s less about our waiting and more about resting in the assurance that God will come through — and has already come through — on His promises.

Choosing How to Walk Through It

There are days when I am angry. There are days when I feel defeated and beaten down. There are days when I don’t want to talk to God because it feels like He doesn’t hear me.

Simply put, I don’t always wait well. When you’re in a season of waiting like we’ve found ourselves in, each day feels like more of the same. It can honestly just become so difficult to pick yourself up and do it all again.

But the beauty of Advent is that how I wait doesn’t change whether or not God comes through.

Jesus is coming no matter what my emotional state looks like. God’s faithfulness doesn’t hinge on my productivity or my ability to keep it all together. Still, my posture matters. I can wait bitterly or expectantly. Closed off or open-handed. I get to choose how I show up in the middle.

Emily said something recently that’s stuck with me. Thinking about the tough seasons we’ve walked through, she said something to the effect of, “When we look back on this season, I don’t want to wonder if I could’ve drawn closer to God.”

Her point was basically this: we have the choice to just sit here and be miserable about the pain and heartbreak we’ve endured, or we can do something with it.

She’s right. We don’t control the circumstances, but we do control how we move through them. We can sit in the frustration and let it rot us from the inside, or we can choose to walk through it with the mindset that God is doing something in us, even if we can’t see it yet.

Waiting well isn’t about pretending everything’s fine. It’s about leaning in instead of checking out.

God Isn’t Slow. He’s Patient.

There are moments in this season when God feels silent. When every prayer feels like it hits the ceiling and drops. It’s easy to read that as slowness or indifference.

But Scripture paints a different picture:

God is not slow. He’s patient.

Last night, one of our Advent studies talked about Genesis 17 and the story of Abraham and Sarah. This story hits particularly close to home for Emily and me.

Abraham and Sarah waited decades — really, pretty much an entire lifetime — for God to fulfill His promise of bringing them a child. Sarah was over 100 years old by this point, and here I sit at 36 thinking time is passing me by.

Abraham and Sarah’s waiting included confusion, doubt, and a lot of wondering if God even remembered them. I’m sure there were plenty of days when they wanted to give up hope.

But God didn’t forget. He was working on a timeline bigger than theirs, and in the right moment, He gave them Isaac.

Isaac wasn’t just a blessing for Abraham and Sarah. He was a crucial part of God’s plan. It was through this bloodline that Jesus eventually came, forever proving that though God may seem slow, he is not absent.

This part of our study gripped me:

“For some of us, God will act sooner than we imagine — healing an illness, reconciling a broken relationship, ending an addiction. For others of us, God will ask us to wait until He returns. For all of us, God’s promise of restoration in Jesus is certain. Though it seems slow, it will come.

That tension is at the heart of Advent — and at the heart of this season for me.

Resting Isn’t Quitting

One important lesson I’ve learned through all of this is that rest isn’t the same thing as giving up.

There are days when I have nothing in the tank mentally, emotionally or spiritually. There are plenty of days when stepping back feels like losing ground or when the exhaustion hits deep enough that rest feels like surrender.

But as Emily and I were discussing this particular study, I was envisioning taking a hike. Depending on the trail, hiking can be a rather arduous adventure, especially if you’re carrying a lot of weight on your back. Mix in the heat, dehydration, and physical soreness, you have to stop sometimes and take a break.

Isn’t it a lot like this when we go through hard seasons? The weight and pain eventually catches up to us and our body tells us it needs a break. But after we’ve let our body recoup some, we’re ready to continue the hike.

I think as we’ve gone through these difficult seasons of waiting, I’ve gone through days and even longer stretches where I’ve needed to just rest and recover. In those moments, I’m tempted to just give up, convincing myself that I don’t have much else left to give to continue on hoping for a different outcome.

But every time I let myself stop, even briefly, something happens:

The next day, I’m ready again. I can think clearly. I can take the next step.

Rest isn’t weakness. It’s part of the fight. Just like any long journey, if you never stop to catch your breath, you won’t make it very far. Endurance isn’t built by going full-speed without stopping. It’s built through the rhythm of pushing, pausing, recovering, and stepping forward again.

My word for the year was perseverance, and honestly, I should’ve expected God to take that seriously. This waiting is forming something in me I wouldn’t gain any other way. This is the kind of growth through trials that’s spoken of in Romans 5:3-5:

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

A Candle for the Middle

The first Advent candle doesn’t light up a whole room. It’s small. It flickers. It takes its time. It reminds me that God rarely rushes His work.

Between the job search and continuing to hope for a child, I still feel the weight of the waiting. I still feel the tension between wanting answers now and trusting that God is doing something I can’t see. But I’m learning to let this season shape me instead of simply frustrate me.

I’m learning to wait with expectation instead of panic. To rest without assuming I’m quitting.

To persevere — not because I’m strong, but because God is steady, and because He always keeps His promises.