Why Waiting is ESSENTIAL for Your Faith and Marriage | Mark Vroegop

Episode Transcript

FamilyLife Today® with Dave and Ann Wilson; Podcast Transcript

This content has been generated by an artificial intelligence language model. While we strive for accuracy and quality, please note that the information provided will most likely not be entirely error-free or up-to-date. We recommend independently verifying the content with the originally-released audio. This transcript is provided for your personal use and general information purposes only. References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. We do not assume any responsibility or liability for the use or interpretation of this content.

The Hardest Word in the English Language…WAIT

Guest:Mark Vroegop

Release Date:June 24, 2025

Mark:Everybody has expectations and it’s okay. Where I was living and what I had hoped were different. And so how do I deal with that gap? And waiting is learning to live on what I know to be true about God when I don’t know what’s true about my life.

Dave:I think we’re about to talk about one of the things I hate the most in life.

Ann:Me too. I was going to say the same thing. Who—

Dave:I thought you were going to get on me because when I drive, I cannot wait.

Ann:Here’s my question.

Dave:I do not want to wait. People are too slow in front of me. I am not a nice Christian man behind them.

Ann:Does anyone like to wait? Especially in our culture, in the American culture, we’re pretty fast paced, and I hate waiting.

Dave:Well, we’re going to find out from Mark Vroegop.

Ann:How do you say it?

Mark:You got it, Vroegop.

Dave:Yeah.

Mark:Just say it really fast. You got it.

Dave:That’s not an easy one to say like Wilson,

Mark:It’s not.

Dave:You say it. I’m so bad at language.

Ann:We have Mark Vroegop with us today and we’re going to talk about waiting.

Mark:Are you a waiter?

Ann:Are you good at waiting?

Mark:I wrote the book because I stink at it.

Dave:Is it really your story?

Mark:Totally, it’s my story. My last name would indicate that I’m a terrible waiter.

Dave:What do you mean?

Mark:The name Vroegop is Dutch. And what a lot of people don’t know is that a lot of Dutch names are very simple or practical. When Napoleon conquered the Netherlands, he made everybody get last names. So they picked names like DeYoung (the young one), or Reichen (the rich), or Vander Molen (from the mill), or Shoemaker (make shoes). Well, Vroegop literally means “early up.”

Dave:Early up.

Mark:Early up, right. So when my great, great, great, great grandfather decided what we’re going to call our people, we’re going to call them “we get up early; all you sleep in, but we are”— He could have chosen Sabbath keeper—

Ann:Or ours Will’s son.

Mark:There we go. There we go. That makes sense.

Dave:Well, you did get up at 3:00 AM today.

Mark:I did get up at 3:00 AM and from the earliest memory as a child you work hard, play hard, get up early. It it’s kind of baked into who I am, and my personality is also driven towards get it done. So I don’t like to wait. I really don’t like it. So I wrote the book because just wanted to learn more about it and because I stink at waiting.

Ann:Okay, let me ask you guys, if you get stuck in a line of traffic, are you on your phone trying to find a way around it?

Mark:A hundred percent.

Dave:Oh yeah.

Mark:I’m on my phone before I’m stuck in traffic.

Dave:Exactly.

Mark:So I’m going to prevent. I’m just not going to not wait. I’m going to prevent waiting much to my wife’s fear because—

Dave:I mean, are you like me? If you’re at a turn right on the red light and the person in front of you is not turning right. There’s nobody coming. They’re just sitting there, whatever reason. They don’t know you can turn right on red or whatever. Have you ever gone around them?

Mark:I’ve not gone around them.

Dave:Well, I have.

Mark:In my heart I have.

Ann:It’s embarrassing. I get stressed. I get notifications on my app, my health app, “Your heart rate is high,” and it’s because he’s driving.

Mark:Oh man.

Dave:You have never told me that.

Ann:I just got one.

Dave:This happens when we’re driving?

Ann:Yes.

Dave:Yeah, that’s bad.

Ann:This is why it’s good you’re here with us, Mark.

Dave:That is bad.

Mark:I hope so. We’ll find out.

Dave:Well tell our listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do. I know you’re married, and you’ve done a lot of things, but not everybody knows the early riser Vroegop.

Mark:Can you imagine? I’m introducing myself in the Netherlands. “I’m Mr. Early Up.” That’s my name: “Mr. Early Up. Mr. Early Up. Pastor Early Up,” right.

Ann:You know what, you’d get a job though.

Mark:Yeah, right? Yeah. If that was “Mr. Takes a Nap a lot,” no way.

Ann:Exactly.

Mark:Anyway, yeah. So I’ve been married to my wife Sarah for 33 years; been in pastoral ministry for 30 some years and yeah, we have four kids. We got three adult sons who are married, got two grandkids, two more on the way, a daughter who’s in college and I just completed a 17-year run at College Park Church in Indianapolis where the Lord has been just pleased to plant us for a really wonderful season. And on March one stepped into a new role as the president of the Gospel Coalition.

Dave:So you didn’t rest long.

Mark:I did not rest long. I did not.

Ann:And your wife is breeding Bernie doodles.

Dave:I was going to say you got a bunch of puppies.

Mark:I do. We got some puppies at home and my wife loves dogs, so do I. And yeah, she’s got a little thing at home with having some beautiful puppies around, so it’s great.

Dave:That’s cool. So honestly, why this book? I mean, this is more than just a book. You’ve been thinking about this, right, for a long time and you decided somebody needs to talk about this. Is that what it was?

Mark:Yeah, so I think like many pastors, 2020 to 2022, 2023, there’s a lot of seasons where just life felt out of control. Church, and life was really difficult, and we faced so many no-win situations. I’d faced all kinds of gap moments in my life in ministry, but that was a season that was really unusual and difficult, and I found myself to be ill-prepared for a theological and practical construct of, how do I think about these gap moments?

Now I’d done some work on lament and applying it to grief, but when I encountered these gap situations, I found myself just knowing that this is an important spiritual moment. I knew that I’d be able to look back on it and go, “Man, God was really doing something,” but in the moment, I just wanted it to be over. I wanted an answer, and I found some things kind of bubbling in my soul that I just was like, “I need to get a better spiritual guidebook of how to think about these particular seasons.”

Ann:When you say gap moment, what do you mean by that? Can you say specifically what were you in?

Mark:Yeah, so a gap moment would be in our human and Christian experience when we’re living in a particular reality, and we’d like it for it to be a different reality.

Ann:That’s a good way to say it.

Mark:And that gap is really stressful. It’s really hard. And practically I talk about it in the book kind of where the church was in terms of what was happening versus what I had hoped would happen. There was a gap between those. And in one moment a counselor that was helping me process some of these things said to me, “Mark, tell me about your expectations for pastoral ministry.” I said, “I don’t have any expectations.” And he did what you did right there.

Dave:Sort of snickered.

Mark:Snickered. I mean, I know I’m not a counselor, but I know counselors. It’s not professional to laugh at your counselee.

Ann:It’s like saying you have no expectations in marriage.

Mark:Right. I don’t know why, because I would’ve thought I had some expectations in marriage, but in ministry I thought I was expectation free, and he started to chuckle. Then my wife started to chuckle. I was like, “Wait a minute, something’s up here.” I’m like, “No, I’m serious.” And then he said to me, “Mark, everybody has expectations and it’s okay. Can you name them?” And that was a pretty signature moment where I was like, “You know what, I guess I do have them and here’s what they are.” And so I named them and where I was living and what I had hoped were different. And so how do I deal with that gap? And that began a journey of unpacking this kind of understanding of waiting, which is, waiting is learning to live on what I know to be true about God when I don’t know what’s true about my life.

Dave:I literally pulled that quote out of your book.

Mark:I’m sure you did. It’s the only thing that I say over and over and over. So I mean it’s the one thing from the book that the Lord just taught me through that season. I’m still in process of learning it.

Dave:Yeah, I mean do we ever fully not need to learn that? I mean it feels like in every area of our life, and maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m exaggerating, but it feels like we have expectations that often there’s a gap. Either it’s a long gap or short gap, but there’s a gap. I mean Ann was sort of kidding, but she’s not, especially in marriage, especially in parenting, especially as a pastor in our job—

Ann:—our friendship.

Dave:We may never say them out loud, but we’ve got them. And then when they’re not there, we’re disappointed and what you do with that gap defines who you are as a person, right?

Mark:Absolutely. And the things that we love the most, we probably have the most expectations about because they’re valuable. And so our expectations are connected to things that are really, really important. And that’s what makes waiting difficult is for a lot of people in a number of situations, the thing that they’re waiting for is actually really good. It would really make sense, and it would be really awesome, and yet it’s out of their control. It’s out of my control.

Ann:Let’s name a few.

Mark:Okay, so waiting to be married—

Ann:Yes.

Mark:—waiting to have kids, waiting for a job, waiting to get an answer on a college acceptance, a promotion, waiting on children to come back to the Lord, waiting on adoption hearing, waiting on sanctification in a particular person’s life and their sin issues or their choices are affecting other people

Ann:Waiting for your spouse to change.

Mark:Yeah. I mean all—

Ann:So many, every area of our lives.

Mark:I mean the entire created order is conditioned in this arena of waiting. And in fact, and I argue in the book, it’s what Christians are doing right now. We’re waiting for the return of Jesus. So waiting, it shouldn’t be surprising, we should be better at it, and we certainly shouldn’t waste it. And that’s where I just wanted to do some work to realize how it could become better at embracing the fact that God not only commends waiting, but he actually commands us to wait.

And so for many of us waiting has an inherently negative connotation and yet in the Bible, waiting is something that’s really, really important. It’s central and God designs it because there are lessons that He wants to teach us. Imagine what we would be like if we got everything we wanted, in the timing in which we wanted it.

Ann:It’s called being teenagers. We want it right now.

Mark:Absolutely. We’d be monsters.

Ann:We would be.

Mark:Because underneath a problem with waiting and specifically with me is this desire to control my life and the gaps reveal, “Oh, I’m actually not as in control of my life as what I thought I was.”

Dave:It’s interesting you listed like five or six or seven things we wait for. My wife listed one and it was waiting for your spouse to change.

Ann:It’s because I talk to women a lot. I talk to women a lot.

Dave:Okay it’s other women, right? That was personal.

Ann:Honey, you are perfect.

Mark:She knows a lot of people like that. She has a friend.

Ann:I have a friend.

Mark:You have a friend, right?

Dave:No, it is true. Everything you said, we have that gap and we wait, but how do we get to the place where we understand waiting is really part of God’s plan. Like you said, it’s actually a good thing, not a—

Ann:Even a command.

Dave:Your title is Waiting Isn’t a Waste, and I’m like, “No, it is a waste.” You want to argue with that right away. It’s like I can’t think of times, but I can obviously. But when you’re in it, you’re thinking this is a waste. There’s so much more good that could be happening in my life, and I’m just stuck. I’m in the gap.

Mark:Right. Well, one way to think about it is just to realize that there are opportunities that exist within the context of waiting that are going to be amazing. And that’s part of the process that God intends for us, for our good. So part of it is to just realize that culturally everything is coming at us faster. There’s a monetization for less wait times. There’s even a status symbol. You go to amusement park, and you can get a skip the line pass or whatever. Or a VIP line or you board on an airplane and you get to be the first ones in because you paid more. So not waiting is a bit of a status symbol.

Ann:Think about AI even. The things we can do so quickly because of AI. There’s so many things.

Mark:Yeah, we’re—

Ann:It is a status symbol too.

Mark:It is.

Dave:I want you to keep going, but one thought I had, are we, what’s the word, poorer at waiting than our grandparents? Because we live in a culture—they didn’t have a microwave. I’ve stood in front of the microwave and gone “Hurry up!”—a microwave and I’m still like—we don’t have to scroll through a cassette tape or VHS to get where we want to go. Is it harder for us or has it always been a problem?

Mark:That’s a great question and I think it would be really fun to ask somebody of an earlier generation if they think it’s easier or harder in our context versus in theirs. I would guess that it is contextually harder now because there’s more of an assumption that we don’t have to wait or I shouldn’t have to wait. So it was more familiar. I’ll give you an example here in a second, but I would guess that in every generation there have been things that people had to wait for that were really difficult regardless of what kind of technology or advancements that they had.

But here’s an example. James uses the illustration of a farmer as it relates to spiritual endurance and he uses that illustration to say as the farmer waits for the latter rains, so you embrace a spiritual endurance. And it’s so interesting that he uses that illustration because if you’re a farmer, you have to work really, really hard and then you plant and then you have to wait.

Dave:Yeah, you just wait.

Mark:And it’s not that you’re not doing anything. You’ve done all of the work. In fact, the best thing you can do is to do nothing. If the farmer gets frustrated, he is like, “Well, I don’t know what’s going on my plants,” so he digs them all up. He ruins the crops. So part of, I think, our problem is we don’t realize the story that we’re in and that waiting is a vital part of what it means to be a Christian. Even think about the plan of the gospel itself. You have good Friday and then you have Easter Sunday. God could have designed a different way to do that, but he let the disciples sit in fear and dismay and a sense of “We hitched our wagon to the wrong guy.”

Dave:They lost all their hope.

Mark:They did until the narrative is flipped with the resurrection. But they were waiting, and it was part of God’s design and plan of redemption.

Or here’s another example. In the Lord’s prayer, it says, “Give us this day our daily bread.” That comes from the Old Testament concept of manna. I love what Betsy Childs Howard says in her book on waiting. She says this: “You can’t buy manna in bulk.”

Ann:It’s true, isn’t it? Even if they did collect more, it rotted.

Mark:So then the question is, so why would God do it that way? Well, the reason is, is so that there would be daily dependence upon him and God ordains gap moments in our lives because if there weren’t any of them, we would think we were God. And so that’s why waiting is so challenging is it confronts me with the reality of I’m actually not as in control of my life as what I thought I was.

Dave:That’s really it. It comes down to control because we aren’t in control.

Mark:It is.

Ann:But you even mentioned Jesus and John the Baptist waiting till they’re like 30. I’ve never had that thought before that they were waiting.

Mark:Yeah. Well if you look at most—

Ann:Moses.

Mark:—biblical heroes in the Bible: Abraham, Isaac, you got Joseph, you got Moses, you got the Apostle Paul. I mean this—waiting isn’t an unusual or unexpected reality. In fact, we may need to reverse engineer how we think about it. We ought to be shocked when we don’t have to wait. But instead we sort of have this idea that I’m shocked when I have to wait. That’s just not a right way to think about the world. Even the fact that we need sleep. God’s ordained that a third of our lives are spent in a semi-conscious non-activity kind of state, and it’s a regular daily reminder that we’re not limitless. We have ways in which our bodies will fail if we don’t get rest. God’s designed it that way.

Dave:So how do we get good at waiting? I mean I’m sure it’s chapter 1, 2, 3. It is all throughout your book, but I’m that guy especially it’s gotten worse, I think, the older I’ve gotten, you agree? She’s shaking her head pretty strong there. I’m not saying I was good at waiting in my thirties or forties. I think I was better though, and I would think I’d get better now. I’ve got wisdom. I’ve lived enough life to go “Things are going to go slower than you want.” But if I go to a fast-food restaurant and the people in my opinion are inept taking our orders and I got to wait five minutes, I’m not—I’m upset.

Ann:I remember you saying to my dad when my dad was probably—

Dave:I know what you’re going to say.

Ann:—in his seventies, and my dad’s stressed, he’s driving, he’s in a store, he’s critiquing people, and I remember you saying, “What do you got going on that you can’t wait for a second?” You remember? What did you say? It wasn’t exactly that.

Dave:It was that idea. I was observing him and thinking, “Wow!!” He was being mean to the waitress like, “Hey, could you get the coffee here quicker?” And I’m like, “Hey, she’s doing the best job she could.” At that point I was looking at him thinking, “What has happened?” He drove faster. I mean, “Dude, you’re too old to be driving and now you’re going like 80.” I’m that guy now. I’m like, “What is happening?” And I’m not saying everybody’s got that experience, but I said when we opened the show, I’m not good at waiting. How do I or anybody get better?

Mark:I think one is just realizing that waiting is normal and it’s common. I think for many of us, we kind of need to get over our surprise with the fact that there’s going to be gaps, and I think that that’s helpful. Nobody’s surprised that it takes nine months for a baby to develop in a womb. No one’s surprised when they go to a wedding, and they get there early, and they sit, and they wait for the bride to come down the aisle. It’s what you do.

So part of it is we’ve got really unrealistic expectations. And so part of it is just naming those and understanding that that’s kind of hardwired into our culture. And then even knowing what our individual expectations are. So just being able to identify where are the seasons or what are the situations where I’m prone to react in an unhelpful way to waiting.

One example would be in Psalm 40. I love this text. It says, “I waited patiently for the Lord.” But there’s no word patient in the original text. Instead, what it essentially says is, and Eugene Peterson translates it this way in the message, “I waited and waited and waited for the Lord.” I love that.

So what does patiently waiting look like? What patiently waiting looks like is waiting longer than what I expected. So what happens is I react to how I thought life was going to be. And so I’ve found that I’m better at waiting when I realize, oh, my waiting is actually a symptom of my desire to control my life. It’s a desire for me to be God. It’s a desire for me to orchestrate the events of my life. And it could be as minor as a traffic situation. It could be as major as a really significant medical test result. Both of those converge in this arena of what it means to want control of my life. And just understanding that, that has actually been helpful.

I think the other thing is shifting our focus from what I don’t know because I can become obsessed with, “I don’t know this. I don’t know that.” And the challenge now is I’ve got a phone, and I can search, and I find all kinds of answers. And instead—

Dave:Even if that has the scroll thing going around, you’re like—

Mark:Oh yeah, the buffering wheel, right. To be able to realize that in this particular moment I have an opportunity to refocus my mind and my heart on what I know to be true about God. And so I even came up with a list of Bible verses that identify who the Lord is. So I’ll just recite it when I’m waiting. The Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my rock. He is my fortress. The Lord is my stronghold. The Lord is a king. He is sovereign. He reigns supreme. The Lord is holy. And it’s amazing. I can fill those gap moments with that kind of truth that changes how—this is an opportunity for me to worship instead of to grumble.

Ann:And you’ve done more than just write that because you just zipped those off through memorization.

Mark:Yeah, I have. I actually have a bracelet that I wear at times, like a little beaded bracelet, and I actually just use those beads, and I’ll just recite those in order to shift my mind and heart from what I’m thinking about in the moment as far as what isn’t true to now rehearsing the Lord is my rock. He is my fortress and just reminding my soul.

Ann:And you’re also by doing that, you’re taking your thoughts captive. You’re not being conformed by the world, but by doing that, you’re being transformed by the renewing of your mind, by reciting the truth that you know about God. How profound and yet simple.

Mark:Yeah, right, exactly. So again, it’s just learning to live, “What do I know to be true about God in this moment?” He’s in control. This feels like it’s such a big deal, but in God’s economy I can trust Him.

I think the other thing then is also knowing kind of what ditch we tend to run to—

Ann:Oh, that’s a good way to put it.

Mark:—when we are struggling with waiting and we all kind of have a go-to sin response.

Ann:What’s your ditch?

Mark:Okay, so I say there’s three ditches. We’ll start at a high level and then—I think I would struggle with all three. I think everyone does, but in a different order. So I call them in the book the three A’s: anger, anxiety, and apathy. So anger, it’s we blow up to try and fill the gap by forcing control. So anger is just my sinful attempt to reclaim autonomy in the moment. If I can’t do something, I’m going to get mad. That’s what sinful anger is.

Anxiety, if I can’t fill the gap and close it, I’m going to think about it and think about it and think about it and think about it. I’m going to obsess. There’s got to be a way I must be missing something.

Or apathy. Apathy is the quiet quitting.

Ann:It’s hopelessness.

Mark:The person’s just like “I don’t care anymore,” when they really do. It’s just a defense mechanism to say, “I don’t want to be hurt again and so I’m not, I’ve given up waiting for this.” The reality is they still are. It’s they’ve reached the point of desperation that has become a soul killer.

Dave:I mean, if you find yourself in that apathy one where I think “I’m so disappointed, but I don’t want to admit it,” so I think “I don’t care.” And you tell people you don’t care, and they just snicker at you. They know you care. How do you dig out of that?

Mark:That’s a tough one.

Dave:Because you don’t want to be apathetic.

Mark:No, you don’t. Well, again, I think it’s what do I know to be true about God in this moment? Because it’s my situation that may not feel like it ever will change. But there’s been a lot of people in the Bible who thought the exact same thing. I mean Joseph before he’s brought to power in Egypt, disciples waiting not knowing that the resurrection is just around the corner. It’s being reminded of what the Bible tells us is true. And in Lamentations in the New Living Translation, Lamentations 3 says this, “I will never forget this awful time, and yet I will dare to hope.”

I love that translation because the idea of daring to hope, that’s where we live, like to hope is actually a dare when you’ve been disappointed. And so it means shifting the focus from, “I really don’t know if I want to have the risk of believing that my life can change” instead to say, “Actually, I’m going to take the step of trusting that God knows best and I’m going to entrust this to Him and keep living,” and living in this gap land, but doing it faithfully.

Dave:Now, what’s your ditch?

Mark:My ditch would be—

Dave:Were those in the right order?

Ann:I think they’re progressive.

Mark:Well, usually we start with one. And some people they start with anxiety and then they go to apathy, and then when that doesn’t work, they get angry. And some folks just start with apathy. So mine, I mean I wrote them just how they would go. I mean, my first reaction is let’s blow through this so anger; and if that doesn’t work, then I think about it. And then apathy, who cares? And so that’s how I fill my gap moments. As I’ve gotten older, I have found that anger really doesn’t work.

Ann:So you skip it.

Mark:I don’t skip it. It just kind of goes to copilot seat with anxiety. So they’re, they’ve become more interconnected, I guess you could say.

Ann:I don’t know if you’ve guys have thought about this, but a lot of—

Dave:I want to know what yours is.

Ann:Mine is that progression. I’ll get angry.

Dave:Same thing.

Ann:Yeah. And then I’ll get anxious about it. I don’t know if I ever get into that apathy. It kicks back into striving. I know I’m going to solve it. I’m going to solve it. It becomes controlling. But what I was going to say was in the Bible, we have these great stories of waiting. Even Noah, think about him building this thing and then he’s in the ship seven days before it even rains. And so I’m thinking, what if you were the Israelites in the desert for 40 years? There’s no like, “Hey, you know what? We don’t even get into the promised land. We’re just going to die here.” It feels like “What are we waiting for?”—to die.

Mark:Right. Yeah, you’re waiting for that last guy to die before you can go into the promised land with that whole generation.

Ann:Yes, think about younger generation. “I wish you’d die.“

Mark:“Come on man, how’s that guy doing?”

Dave:Somebody.

Ann:But if you’re the person that you know that you’re going to be one of the ones that die.

Mark:Yeah. That’s pretty sober.

Ann:Where do you find your hope in that? You’re in the ditch. How do you get out of that ditch?

Mark:Yeah. Well, it would be in some respects, adjusting your definition of the promised land.

Ann:That’s it.

Mark:Because God’s still with His people, even the wilderness wasn’t a waste. It was still a place where God did some amazing things in miracles and led people through some unbelievable lessons that recorded for us in the scripture. So that wilderness was not a place of a lack of intentionality on God’s part.

Ann:It wasn’t a waste.

Mark:No. So you could say the wilderness isn’t a waste too, because God used that season to really form some important things in Israel and also to set a record that God’s discipline is always good, but it isn’t easy.

Ann:And think about that generation probably saw more miraculous signs than any other generation, and He was with them visibly. They could even see His presence.

Mark:It was also interesting. That’s a positive one. They also cycle through the murmuring and the complaining piece. And you look at that and you’re like, “Man, how in the world can they do that?” And then you look at your story and you’re like, “Yeah, I know how they can do that. That’s my story.”

Dave:I did that yesterday at a traffic jam. It made me not even late, just often what happens.

Ann:Where are you in the ditch?

Dave:You tell me. I was thinking, “What would your wife say?” What would you say?

Ann:Anger.

Dave:I’m the same progression.

Ann:Yeah. I don’t see much anxiety or apathy in you.

Dave:What?

Ann:I don’t see it because it’s internal, I think. I feel it.

Dave:Oh, I feel it.

Ann:But I don’t necessarily see it.

Dave:I think it’s initially anger, just like you said.

Ann:I think it’s a good question to ask people.

Dave:That’s a really good question.

Mark:It is. And I think that’s one of the ways you actually begin to get better at biblical waiting by realizing, “Oh, wait a minute. My reaction right now is because I want control. I’m actually stepping into a space where I’m angry, and the reason I’m sinfully angry is because I’m trying to use anger to regain control in this gap.” Just realizing that actually caused you to go, “Okay, hold on a minute. I can use this gap instead of letting this gap use me. I can use it as an opportunity to—well, do what Psalm 27 says, ‘Let your heart take courage. Wait for the Lord.’”

The idea in my mind is you go into the library of God and all the books say courage, and you get to check out a courage book and take it with you as you wait on the Lord. And I think that’s really an important thing to get our heads around so we can wait more effectively.

Dave:Have you found waiting in your marriage and parenting? I mean, we’re a marriage and family show, so I’m thinking waiting is at the center of marriage. It’s at the center of family. How’s that impacted you?

Mark:Well, you’d think that when you launch kids, that everything is so easy from that point forward. So when you’re young, you’re just exhausted all the time.

Ann:You’re just waiting for them to get out of this hard stage.

Mark:You’re waiting for the next sinful—

Dave:Diapers and—

Mark:I won’t to be morbid, but the next sinful season of life that they’re going to be in. It’s not that dim. Although I will tell you that when, so we have twin boys, and when somebody in our church had been pregnant with twins and they’re like, what’s it like? How was it? And this is what I say to them, year four is great. And they’re like, it’s four years. And I’m like, yeah, it’s four years of just good luck. It’s really, really, really hard. But then when you have adult children, you don’t have control.

You have love like you’ve always had, and you have parental concern, but it’s the natural progression for them to become their own people and to make their own decisions and to build their families. But then when they have challenges or fears, you’re waiting for a phone call after they get the phone call. And that’s a space that’s really difficult. It just is. And so I think every season of life as parents, there are different applications of waiting. When the kids are young, you’re waiting for them to grow up and become mature or just to be able to tie their shoes and get in the car and buckle themselves in.

And then you’re waiting for when they’re teenagers for the frontal cortex to develop so they make better decisions. I use this illustration at my church. This is a true story. My college aged daughter came home, and she was just telling us some decisions she was making. We were just like, “Wow, we’re so proud of you. I mean, this is just well done.” And she said this quote, she says to my wife, “Isn’t it nice that I have a developed frontal cortex now?”

Ann:And did she say, “Isn’t it nice that mine developed before my brothers?”

Mark:Well, yeah. So yeah, she didn’t say that, but she maybe could have as a young woman, but you’re waiting for each stage of development or waiting for them to kind of get it, or you make so many deposits as parents and they’re by faith deposits, and you don’t know what’s sinking in and you don’t know what’s taking root. And it’s a faith walk. I mean, you’re putting the word of God in their minds and hearts and you’re praying that the spirit causes it to grow. And so I don’t think there is any season in our Christian walk or any season in marriage or any season in parenting that doesn’t involve waiting of some kind. I think it’s just a different kind of waiting.

Dave:Yeah. Yeah, and I think as you think about marriage, the thing that’s hard to understand is that that takes a long time to get the marriage you had expectations you would have in year one. You’re probably not going to have in year one; you might not have in year five or ten. I mean, even now, we are going on 45 years, and we hear people say they’ve been married 18. And you’re like, “Oh, you’re just kids.” And they’re thinking, “I’ve been married a long time,” and they have, but you’re like, “Man, you learn so much more but it’s hard.” Your first chapter “Waiting is Hard.” It is hard.

Ann:I think waiting too—often, I talk to wives, so this is my story of talking to wives, and I felt this too. I’m waiting for Dave to get his act together. And maybe I was waiting so long because God was trying to put a mirror in front of my face and saying, “I’m waiting for you to wait on me.” It’s just like, “Oh, that’s way harder than just fixing him. You want to work on me.” So I like that there’s always God’s hand of love and mercy and grace in our waiting because He’s waiting for us to seek Him and to surrender to Him. It’s not easy.

Mark:It is not. And it just doesn’t matter what space that we’re waiting in I think the application is the same. That if you don’t know what’s true about your husband, you do know what’s true about the Lord. Or if you don’t know what’s true about your wife, you do know what’s true about the Lord. Now, by God’s grace, you would love to see a spouse or a child or whomever grow in grace and change, but if your emotional stability or happiness is connected to their ability to deliver on your expectation of their change rate, that makes for a really miserable life.

Ann:And it’s called an idol.

Mark:Right.

Ann:“When that happens, I can then be happy.”

Mark:Right.

Ann:We have no guarantee.

Mark:Yeah. I think it was one, I don’t know who said this, but someone said, “We think we take up idols so we can control them, and they end up controlling us.”

Ann:Yes, exactly. Who’s that quote by?

Mark:That may be a—

Ann:You could just take it yourself.

Mark:—maybe an Ed Welch quote from a book on idolatry. I don’t know, somewhere.

Ann:That’s good. Well, when you talk about: “When your thinking is off, and the internal tension is rising, I hope you’ll remember to wait,” and you have an acrostic a FAST. Can you talk about that a little bit? I thought these were super practical.

Mark:Yeah. I need tools that I can remember quickly and can be useful.

Ann:Me too.

Mark:So I use that acrostic of FAST, which stands for focus, adore, seek, and trust. And it comes out of Psalm 27, how the psalmist shifts his focus. And in verse one, it says, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” And the whole concept of waiting in that particular text is apparently there’s something really scary coming his way. He talks about an army that’s camped against him. And so one of the critical decisions in waiting is deciding “I could focus on what I don’t know, or I could focus on what I do know. I’m going to choose to focus on what I know to be true,” which is what Psalmist is doing in verse one.

So adore is then taking that gap moment and turning it into a worship opportunity. Instead of thinking about everything that I lack, I can now use it as an opportunity to thank God that I have everything I need in him. And in that way, the gap becomes a beautiful place of growth instead of this uncertain season that is just driving me crazy.

So focus, adore, seek. Now, here’s where I begin to ask for God’s help. “Hey, in this moment, God, I need you to help me. I’m feeling this tension. I’m feeling these difficulties, and I’m asking you to make your word real and practical in my life.” The psalmist says, “Hear, O Lord, when I cry, be gracious to me and answer me. When I seek your face, do not hide your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger. Cast me not off; forsake me not.”

So the psalmist is asking for God’s help. I mean, he knows. God, we’d like to know what the answers are to this. We don’t have it right now. So we’re asking you to help us to wait upon you. And we haven’t really explored that yet. In this conversation, we’re talking about reactive waiting, but there’s actually an affirmative waiting where the Bible doesn’t just commend it, but commands it. Build waiting on the Lord into your life, your daily practice, create gap moments, not just that you are responding to, but ones that you create because waiting on the Lord is that valuable. So think of that not only is waiting out a waste; it’s actually a thing that I should build into my daily life—that I create my own gap moment so I can learn to wait on the Lord.

So focus, adore, seek, and then trust is I just renew my confidence and belief in God’s ability to be sovereign over everything. Psalmist says, “I believe”—this is so great—”I believe that I will look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living! Wait for the Lord; be strong. Let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!”

What a powerful statement. I believe that I will look upon the goodness of the Lord, the land of the living, I believe. I believe so that’s what it means to wait on the Lord. It means you’re looking with expectation for something that you don’t have in the moment, but you’re looking to God as the one who will provide it. So that’s focus, adore, seek and trust.

Ann:That’s good.

Dave:I mean that first one, they’re all important, but that first one is so critical, isn’t it? It’s what you’re looking at, dwelling on, meditating in a sense, whether it’s worry or anxiety, that’s a sense of meditation. It’s like, I’m thinking about this. No, I got to get my eyes vertical. I got to get my eyes on the Lord, not on the situation. That’s hard too.

Mark:It is. And I think you’re right. If you can, at least I found this to be true. If I can click into focus, it really sets me on a good trajectory to be able to embrace this moment, not as something that’s inherently bad. Now, don’t get me wrong, it still feels tense. And we should talk about that for a moment. One of the words in the Hebrew for wait is qavah. And that word has at its root, the idea of a chord that’s been twisted. And the idea is hope that has tension built into it. So it’s a kind of hope. In fact, the word hope and wait are used and translated interchangeably in the Bible. So just let that sink in.

Dave:What?

Mark:Yes, hope and wait mean, are the same thing, but for most of us—

Ann:I’ve never heard that.

Mark:But for most of us, we don’t think of hope and wait as the same thing. So think of it this way. We are waiting for the Lord, so we are hoping in Him. So we think of it that way. But even when it comes to a gap moment, I’m waiting, but I’m waiting because I’m hoping that something would be different. And the question is, what am I hoping in? So wait and hope go together. And the reason why that word qavah is so important is because there’s an implicit tension in waiting. And I found myself spending way too much energy thinking about how tense I felt and how bad it was. And I’ve just begun to embrace it like, “Oh, I feel tense because I’m waiting.”

Ann:So you wake up in the middle of the night, you like, all these things are in your mind.

Mark:Yep.

Ann:What did you do? That’s what you did?

Mark:Well, I would realize, “Oh,” so it used to freak me out. “Oh, I feel so stressed, so tense.” Or sometimes I’ve had it before where I would wake up and I would feel that and wouldn’t know what I was supposed to be stressed about so I’d go on a stress search—

Ann:Yes, we all do that.

Mark:—where I’m nervous about something. I wake up, “I should be worried about something.” Or “What is it that—oh, that must—

Ann:You’re going through all the things that could possibly be—

Mark:A hundred percent, right? So now I’ve just learned, oh, when I wake up, it’s just kind of a, I don’t know, rush of adrenaline, cortisol, whatever it is. Oh, it’s the morning anxiety rush. Welcome. Let’s get some coffee.

Ann:Welcome. Oh here you are.

Mark:Welcome. Hello.

Dave:It’s my friend waiting.

Mark:There we go. And so when waiting happens and I feel tense, I don’t freak out about it anymore. I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I’m waiting. And waiting always involves tension. So these go together.” So okay, it’s like, it’s winter, it’s cold. Alright, so get a coat. You know what I mean? So instead of just like, oh, I feel so tense. Yeah, it’s because you’re waiting and waiting and tension go together. They coexist and it’s actually linked into the word. And I just found that to be helpful. And quite frankly, really liberating because I spent way too much time being all freaked out that I had this internal tension. I’m waiting. Tension goes with the waiting.

Dave:Is that your conclusion? It’s embrace your waiting. Is that sort of it? I’m going to embrace this rather than push it. It’s my friend. Embrace it. Walk with it.

Mark:Yeah. Not only would I say embrace; it would be this first step, yes, to welcome it. But then I would say also to learn from your waiting. So if it’s a friend, we’ll use that metaphor that, hello friend. Welcome. Glad you’re here, glad you’re here. Air quotes. And then what could you teach me?

So instead of seeing a gap as an invasion, you see a gap as an opportunity. Oh, here’s a moment where I don’t know what’s true about my life. I feel tense. It’s my desire to be in control. I could use anger. I’m not going to. Instead I’m going to think about what I know about God because this is a great opportunity for me to grow in grace and actually to be a Christian. And to be a Christian means I’m waiting. I’m hoping. I’m looking. I look to Jesus for the forgiveness of my sins. I look to Jesus for His grace every day, and I look to Him a little more intensely when gap moments emerge.

Ann:That’s a totally different mindset.

Mark:It is.

Ann:Because when we wake up, generally speaking, with exhausted and anxious—

Dave:In some ways we wake up and do this—

Ann:—which creates that. But we see it as an enemy. The enemy’s here. You’re saying, “Hello, friend, I know you.”

Mark:Yeah. Yeah.

Ann:That’s a different mindset.

Mark:You’re human. I mean, so yeah, you’re human. We live in a fallen world. There are gaps. They create stress. And so rather than just freaking out that you feel tension, just be like, yeah, it’s what it means to be a human. I’m not in control.

Ann:This is such a great conversation with parents and especially teens.

Mark:Oh yeah.

Ann:That are struggling.

Dave:I was also thinking toddlers.

Ann:Because the parents have toddlers.

Dave:Parents of toddlers.

Ann:Because they’re tired and stressed.

Dave:Well, I can remember those days, when our kids are in those days, you’re like you cannot wait till they’re older. Come on, just get out of this.

Mark:Or for bedtime.

Dave:Anything, and it’s hard because it’s very slow. It’s going to take seven or eight years, and you can’t rush it.

Ann:And so I think, yeah, embracing that God’s teaching me, God’s pruning me. He’s shaping me through all of this. “Welcome, Lord. I’m going to be on the potter’s wheel as you shape me in this season.” But when our kids are anxious, it creates anxiety to me. I can’t sleep now with adult kids when I’m worried about them.

So as a parent, I’m looking at some of the things we’ve talked about of when you’re waiting, what’s your ditch? I think teens want to talk about this, and they don’t even know how that could happen. Even to lead, as a parent saying, if you were my dad and you woke up and said, here’s what I felt this morning when I woke up, I think every teen would exhale like, “Oh, you too?”

Dave:You too, yeah.

Mark:I think that’s a great point. I think normalizing the tension of waiting and appropriately letting our kids in on the tension of the moment. We did something that was a little—it was instructive. When I was making the decision about taking this role with the Gospel coalition, I actually brought our adult kids into the conversation really early. And I said, “Here’s this job description and profile. Here’s where mom and I are at. We haven’t made a decision, and we feel a level of tension about this because we love our church. We don’t want to leave, but we see this, and we’d like to have you look at this and can you tell us what you think?”

And so we kind of welcome them into the tension. And that was really helpful for me. And I later found out was incredibly helpful and affirming for them.

Dave:In what way?

Mark:I think that one, for me, it was helpful because they know their dad and they offered some really great insights. I think on their end, I think they would say they felt honored, respected, and valued, like their opinion mattered. And I think also they could see that there’s a tension and maybe it normalized the kind of tensions that they were working through, trying to figure out.

I think the same is true of matters related to grief and sorrow. So often parents overprotect their kids about what’s going on in their parents’ soul. Now you can overshare, you can be overly transparent in a way that’s really damaging. But I find that a lot of parents are so allergic to helping their kids develop the resistant muscles because they want to protect them, which I think really at the end of the day is actually not about protecting the kids. It’s actually about parents protecting themselves. Grief is scary for me, and it’s really scary when someone else is grieving. I don’t like it in me, and I really don’t want it in you. And if you have it and I have it, it’s just, I just can’t so we pretend. I think gaps, they’re not the same as grief, but allowing our kids to see this is a tough situation and we’re trying to fight our way through it is really helpful.

Dave:Yeah, that’s good. I just thought of a question for our FamilyLife Partners in the bonus section. FamilyLife Partners are people that support us financially, monthly, and we love you and thank you. And so we offer them a little extra at the end of the broadcast, the interview with you. We have a question that they can get. So if you’d like to become one, go to FamilyLifeToday.com. You hit the donate button. You can do it right now and then hear the rest of this conversation. I’m not going to ask you a question now. I got it later.

Ann:Are you going to remember it?

Mark:I just want to be clear with something; that if they do that, they don’t have to wait. Is that correct?

Dave:Exactly.

Mark:Okay, very good. I just wanted that clear.

Dave:So do it now. That was perfect. That was perfect. How do you think, and again, this is not the bonus question, but when you’re just talking about children and your adult children, is there a way we as parents can help them be better waiters—help them wait better? Is it they watch us, or is there something we can teach? Or is it how we live? How can we help that? Our kids are not going to be come out of the womb good at this. Nobody is. It’s the fallen nature, and so they’re going to struggle with it, and they’ve got parents, but as parents, we want them to be better at this. Is it on us to model it?

Mark:Well, it’s pretty hard to teach your kids something that you don’t know how to do, and you don’t emulate. So I wouldn’t recommend teaching it if a parent hasn’t and doesn’t have any skill sets in this. If they’re terrible at waiting, need to work at waiting first, and then—

Ann:You can say, “Guys, pray for me. I need this.”

Mark:So I think that it’s a really important part of discipleship that any Christian and Christian kids in particular understand that life is going to be full of gaps. There’s going to be things that you don’t know and instead of freaking out that you don’t know, this is an opportunity to trust the Lord and wait with him. That involves parents modeling how to have a God-centered sort of non-anxious perspective on this moment.

It also involves, I think, pointing out what the scriptures say about waiting, and then it’s just on the ground in the moment, walking one step at a time through uncertain seasons and trying to help each other learn how to take just one further step in obedience. Eugene Peterson talks about the long obedience in the same direction. Let’s just do the next right thing and trust God and kind of go on this journey together.

Ann:I mean, I think too, as a parent, I could see, because we have grandkids now. The oldest is ten, but even at ten years old, they’re feeling the stress of life already. But I like that you have things that you can rehearse. It’s like instead of constantly mulling over—

Dave:You know why you see that?

Ann:Yeah, because you bold—

Dave:I blew it up in our notes. This is so good.

Ann:Instead of constantly mulling over what isn’t clear or known, consider intentionally rehearsing the following. And I’m picturing having this on a mirror or a bedside when a kid can’t go to sleep or they’re just mulling things over that—

Dave:Or a parent can’t go to sleep.

Ann:Well, yeah. If the kid isn’t going to sleep, the parent isn’t. But kids that are teenagers, here’s what they can remember: “Waiting is normal and hard. I shouldn’t be surprised.” Somebody really good wrote this down. “God is in control of the events and the timing of my life, and I can rest.” Just to read that and to pray.

Dave:Wait, wait, wait, you got to stop on that one because that is, I know true. I’ve meditated on that. And yet when I get to “I can rest,” I often get stuck. It’s like, “I know this is true, I know this is true” and the second when I’m thinking it, I’m good and then by the time I finish the sentence, I’m already— you know what I mean? The anxiety’s coming up, or maybe the anger or the three we talked about. I can feel it in my soul even as I say it.

Ann:Well, this is allowing you—

Dave:So I believe this. So you’re saying it’s almost like a workout? It’s like say it, think it.

Mark:Yeah. I mean, gaps are going to be filled with something.

Ann:Oh, that’s a good way to say it.

Mark:So the question is what are they going to be filled with? Gaps are not, I mean, maybe they’re neutral in some way. I just haven’t found them to be neutral. So when I’m in a season or I’m really struggling with waiting, I have to do something because I am going to do something. I’m going to fill it with something so that’s why thinking about who God is, or I’ll go on a walk, or I’ll just rehearse what I know to be true. I’ll get my body moving or my mind refocusing because if I stay in neutral, I’m going to fill that back up with other things, other thoughts—

Ann:Yeah, that’s good.

Dave:That’s really good.

Mark:—other processes that I’m trying to figure out how to bridge my gap.

Ann:Well, even this one: there’s a lot I know to be true about God right now; I should think about that. But I read that, and I think, “Not everybody knows who He is and that He’s good and that He’s with them.” So I think knowing the scriptures too, that’s really important.

Mark:It is.

Ann:Because when you understand and read the scriptures, you really understand “This is who He is, and I can rest.”

Mark:One of the things that we did at one season is we wanted to try and fill our gaps with more gratitude; that we were missing what was present disproportionately by focusing on what was absent. And so we had this little whiteboard on our fridge, and every morning before school, we would gather, had this little family ritual. We didn’t do it for months or years. We did it for a couple of weeks because we kind of needed to focus our minds and hearts. And we just said, “Hey, what are we thankful for today?” We just put on the board four things, just super helpful, be reminded, “Oh, these are the normal graces of life that God has given to us that we probably would’ve taken for granted.” And we just wanted to recognize them, post them, rehearse them, and it was fun. Come home from work and variety of experiences, and there they are and guess what? Those are still true.

Ann:Oh, that’s good.

Mark:True this morning and true tonight. And just finding simple ways to be able to rehearse the goodness of God and to think about it and to memorialize it in some way.

Ann:Well, that leads into the next one: this uncertainty pushes me to dependent prayer and that’s really good. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m in the gap, I’m in the ditch. The gap leads to the ditch. When I’m right there, I can picture myself handing all of this over to God. I visually can see it. I picture myself handing it to Him—this good, good God. And then I’m telling Him too, “These are all the things I’m carrying. This is the ditch I’m in. These are the lies I’m starting to believe, and I’m anxious and I’m angry” and all of that. But to hand it to Him, it helps me to go back to sleep, to talk to Him about it and to release it to Him.

Mark:Yeah. One of the other things that I find, it’s parallel to that, is to be able to name and release my expectations.

Ann:Oh, yeah, that’s a good one. I haven’t done that as much.

Mark:So that I say, “God, I have an expectation that by tomorrow at 10, I’m going to get an answer for this, and I’m anxious that I’m not going to. So I’m being very specific. I would like to know, I would like to receive an email, and I’m thinking that it should be by nine o’clock tomorrow.” And I just, by naming it, it helps me to identify its reality and then also confirm its legitimacy. Sometimes I’m like, “Well, why would I have that expectation?”

Ann:Until you’ve said it or prayed it, you didn’t even realize you had it.

Mark:No, but emotionally, oh, it was there. So by naming it and then just releasing it to the Lord. When Peter talks about casting your anxieties on Him, I think that’s an expression or a form of doing that it’s not just casting my anxieties, I’m actually casting the expectations that create the anxieties. I’m trying to get even kind of further underneath it.

Ann:He says to do it because He cares for us.

Mark:Cares for you, right.

Ann:Yeah.

Dave:Yeah, but you have to choose to believe.

Mark:You do.

Dave:How about the last one? I can draw—again, this is rehearse this, I can draw upon the Lord’s strength. He promises to help me when I wait.

Mark:That one is a pretty special moment. I actually learned that from my wife, and now it comes right out of Psalm 27. But it’s a pretty dark moment where I was sitting on the couch. We were drinking coffee. We do that just about every morning, just 15 minutes, “What’s your day going to look like?” And yeah, I just said to her, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”—ministry. I was just like, “This is so hard,” and I was just so discouraged. Everything I was trying, didn’t feel like it was working. I had expectations and they were just getting blown up. And I mean, I was in a tough spot.

Ann:How old were you? Are you younger?

Mark:No, it was three years ago.

Ann:Whoa.

Mark:I talk about it in the book, and she looked at me and it was just a signature moment. And she said to me, “Mark, God is going to help you. He has to.” And there was something about that truth, packaged that way. And I was like, “Yeah, He does. He said He would help me.” So it’s not just a promise. It’s like what Hebrews said when God promises and he swears on himself, what greater thing could he swear upon? God is, He’s going to help you. He has to.

It didn’t solve all the problems. It didn’t resolve all the tension. But that’s when I began to realize I’m actually not living daily on the promises of God’s Word. I’m allowing the circumstances of life to overly dictate where I’m at emotionally. I don’t just need to trust in God. I actually need to believe that He’s trustworthy. And I know that sounds like the same thing, but to me they feel different. And what she was saying is, you can trust God. He said He’s going to help you, and He has to help you because He said He would. And that’s I think just really important and practical as it relates to what it means to be a follower of Jesus when we placed our trust in God’s ability to make good in His promises.

Dave:I mean, when you got up that day and went to work, was it, was the reality different? I mean, did you feel like, “Okay, what I was feeling this morning”—

Mark:I mean it was a perspective changer. It didn’t make all of the problems or challenges go away. Part of it too was everything that she said I believed, but sometimes we need somebody else to speak those truths into our hearts and they are more believable because somebody else said them to us. It’s sort of like when you’re singing in corporate worship on Sunday and you believe it more because there’s lots of other people singing with you. Their singing helps your belief.

Ann:You still get emotional about that time.

Mark:I do.

Ann:Yeah. When you’re sharing it, it still, it’s right there.

Mark:It was a pretty important moment.

Ann:It was a defining moment.

Mark:It was. And again, I don’t want to present it as though that everything was different after that. Everything was not different after that. But what was different is my perspective started to shift. I started to learn to live on what I knew to be true about God when I don’t know what truth about my life. I thought that’s where that was coming out of. That was the moment that kind of set me into that arena to begin learning those things.

Now, here I am talking about waiting and those lessons came out of a season I wouldn’t want to repeat. And yet most of us have a story like that, that we look back and give us a year, three, five, ten, and we can go, “Wow, I grew a lot in that.” That was really good and really hard and gap moments are really good if we can see them as good.

Dave:And there’s the—

Ann:Go ahead.

Dave:I was just going to say there’s the beauty of marriage and your spouse when you have the courage to speak something hard out; you could have kept that to yourself.

Ann:That’s a good point.

Dave:You’re struggling. I’ve done that before. It’s like I’m not going to weigh her down with it, but then when I do, “I don’t know if I can,” there’s this beauty, often beauty, sometimes it’s truth and I don’t want to hear it from her.

Ann:But the vulnerability.

Dave:Other times it’s a reminder of what your wife did, and it changed everything.

Mark:Absolutely, yeah. And yeah, that’s the beauty of marriage. You are able to help one another through the difficulties of life.

Dave:But you had to have the courage to say it out loud, what you were feeling. I bet you weren’t feeling it just that morning. You’ve been feeling it.

Mark:Yeah, for sure.

Dave:You have a partner to say it to.

Mark:It certainly was building over a period of weeks and months for sure.

Dave:Yeah.

Ann:So how are you different now in that gap time that you experienced waiting?

Mark:That’s a great question. I still have a long way to go because I don’t know if I’ll ever be in a spot where I see a gap moment and I’m like, “Oh good.”

Dave:Yeah.

Mark:I just don’t know. But I don’t see them as threatening. I don’t see them as inherently negative. I see them with a persevering lens and a resiliency that’s different. Like, “There’s something good here. I just can’t wait to see what it’s going to be.” As opposed to “This is an absolute waste of time.” I see gap moments as, “Oh, God’s got something in store for me here that I am going to see someday. I just don’t see it right now.”

I’ve even used it to pray over my schedule for the day, naming my expectations over particular meetings. “I would expect this to be the case and expect this to be the case and God, I think this means is going to go like this.” And when it doesn’t, I am less surprised. I’m not pessimistic, but I’ve just kind of gotten over my expectations in how they have tended to not normally be super helpful. They’ve added a lot of extra emotion to things that it’s not entirely needed.

I’ve also found my heart being drawn to worship and deep levels of trust when I’m desperately in those gaps in a way that I’m getting there quicker; that I’m jumping to let your heart take—I’m taking courage. I’m borrowing courage from the Lord more quickly because of my journey and understanding what it means to wait on the Lord.

Ann:That’s really cool. It makes me think of Chuck Swindoll, the first time I heard him say God will, as we walk with God, He’ll never allow your pain to be in vain. He’s always using it. Always. It’s never wasted. And man, when I was in my thirties, oh, like pain is insane. That’s what it is. I don’t want to experience it. And yet nothing has shaped me more is the pain and the gaps and the waiting. And I think it’s a good reminder for our kids too.

Mark:It is.

Ann:Because we hate our kids to be in the gap.

Mark:Absolutely.

Ann:And to be in pain in the ditch; hate it.

Mark:There is something good that the Lord is going to teach and emerge from this gap moment. And it’s only a matter of time until He proves himself to be faithful. The Bible promises that.

Dave:Yeah. I mean, Mark, it has been rich. One of the things that just hit me was it sort of reshapes this waiting concept. Tell me if you thought this. It sort of reshapes disappointment with God because we all at some point experienced disappointment. And some of it’s the gap. We have this expectation; it’s not happening. So we live in this disappointment. It’s like, ah, it doesn’t have to be disappointment. Again, don’t neglect that feeling if you’re feeling that.

Ann:It’s disappointing to my heart right now but—

Dave:It’s like welcome it as a friend to say, “Okay, this is a waiting moment. Who knows what God’s going to do with it. But if I hang on, focus, adore, seek and trust, I got it, man, fast.

Mark:Good job.

Dave:I think I’m going to be able to look back someday and say, “Okay, it still was really hard. It really was hard, but I know Him more intimately than I ever would’ve if it would’ve been microwave instant.”

Ann:And what I was thinking too, Mark, as you were speaking, I was thinking of the great commission in Matthew 28. He gives them, here’s the commissioning to the go reach the world. And when I was younger, this didn’t hit me as much, but His very last sentence on the earth to His disciples were, and surely, I am with you always to the very end of the age. I’m with you always. I’m with you always. I’m with you always. That’s a good reminder because He’s with us in the gap.

Mark:Absolutely.

Ann:He’s with us in the ditch. He’s with us in our highs and lows.

Dave:Yeah, so thanks.

Mark:Yeah, thank you.

Ann:Hey, thanks for watching and if you liked this episode—

Dave:You better like it.

Ann:—just hit that like button.

Dave:And we’d like you to subscribe, so all you got to do is go down and hit the subscribe. I can’t say the word subscribe. Hit the subscribe button. I don’t think I can say this word.

Ann:Like and subscribe.

Dave:Look at that; you say it so easy. Subscribe, there it goes.

FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife®, a Cru® Ministry.

Helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.

If you’ve benefited from the FamilyLife Today transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs of producing them and making them available online?

Copyright © 2025 FamilyLife. All rights reserved.

www.FamilyLife.com