When Waiting Feels Wasted

No matter what Bible reading plan I’m following, I’m back in Genesis every January. I love returning to the same passages because I inevitably notice something new, gleaning something fresh that I had overlooked before. This year was no different.

As I was reading about Perez, the son of Judah who is in the line of Christ, I was struck by how much turmoil, waiting, and heartache surrounded the chosen people, especially those connected to the line of the Messiah. It’s easy to assume that if we are faithful and follow God, if God chooses us and employs us in his kingdom, our lives should look shiny and clean. But Genesis gives us a different picture.

From the earliest families in Scripture, nothing is neat or straight forward. There are strained marriages, complicated relationships, intense sibling rivalries, deception and jealousy, struggles with infertility, wayward children, and long stretches of waiting. There is sin and sorrow and loss. And yet this is the line through which God brings redemption into the world.

That alone should recalibrate our expectations, reminding us that God’s faithfulness is not measured by how long we’ve been waiting, or whether our lives appear thriving and happy. God does not usually work through the tidy parts of our lives. He works through messiness—through our weaknesses, the circumstances we wish were different, and the things we have waited for, longed for, and even given up on—to show us his strength.

Sarah: Waiting with a Promise

Abraham and Sarah waited twenty-five years for a child after they had been promised one. Twenty-five years of wondering if they had even heard from God. For Sarah, twenty-five years of the pain of being called barren, waiting and wondering if God would fulfill his promises through her. And for over a decade, assuming that the promise given to Abraham did not apply to her, and that her family would continue through another woman instead.

And then Isaac came, the son of laughter and promise, the fulfillment of all God had spoken. Sarah’s dream come true. After Isaac’s miraculous birth to a ninety-year-old woman, one might expect the rest of the story to get easier. But Isaac’s life also included long seasons of waiting.

Rebekah: Waiting Without an Explanation

After Sarah died, Isaac married Rebekah, who also struggled with infertility. They waited twenty years for a child—twenty years of waiting, two decades of disappointment. Unlike Abraham and Sarah, they did not have a specific promise to hold onto.

Eventually, Isaac and Rebekah had twin sons, Esau and Jacob, and from the beginning their loyalties were divided—Rebekah to Jacob and Isaac to Esau. After Rebekah and Jacob deceived Isaac to secure the blessing that rightfully belonged to Esau, Esau resolved to kill his brother, so Rebekah sent Jacob away. The Bible never records her seeing her favorite son again, while she lived near Esau, who married Hittite women who made her life bitter.

Leah: Waiting to Be Loved

After deceiving his brother, Jacob fled for his life. And then the deceiver himself was deceived by his future father-in-law. He married Leah, thinking he was marrying Rachel.

Rachel was the one Jacob loved, and Leah lived her life under the weight of being unloved. Jacob never chose her first, consistently favoring Rachel and the children she bore him. Leah longed for her husband’s affection and hoped her children would win his heart. But they never did.

Leah’s story is full of heartache, but it is also full of God’s attention. With each of her first three children, she was hoping her husband would finally want her. But when the fourth, Judah, was born, she said, “This time I will praise the Lord” (Genesis 29:35). In the middle of rejection and longing, she stopped waiting for an outcome and lifted her eyes to God.

Jacob had twelve children in total. And the line of Christ came through Judah, the son of Leah, the unchosen and unloved wife.

Tamar: Waiting, Silence, and a Complicated Redemption

Judah married and had three sons. His oldest son, Er, married Tamar, but the Lord put him to death for his wickedness. His second son then married Tamar, and he too died for his wickedness. As was the custom, Judah then promised Tamar to his third son, Shelah, when he had grown up.

But when Shelah was grown, Judah did not keep his promise to Tamar. By this time, she’d been waiting for years, living in her father’s house, wearing the garments of widowhood.

After Judah’s wife died, Tamar took action in a way that makes most of us want to look away—a tangled and broken story in which Judah himself fathered her children, and later acknowledged his guilt, declaring Tamar more righteous than himself. She bore him twins, and one of them was Perez, who is in the line of Christ. In Tamar’s story, we see the heart of the gospel: God brings redemption not through our righteousness, but through his sovereign grace working in the midst of human sin and suffering.

When I looked at Genesis through the lives of these women, I couldn’t get past the point: the story of redemption is not based on clean genealogies and uncomplicated families. God’s purposes are often accomplished through situations we would never choose.

The Pattern Continues in the Line of Christ

We don’t know all the stories of the other women in the line of Christ, but we do know a few. And the stories we do know are not polished or painless.

Ruth and Bathsheba, both mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy, were widows. Bathsheba’s story is especially sobering. David took her and when she became pregnant, David had her husband murdered. David had other wives and other children, but it was Bathsheba’s son Solomon who was in the line of Christ.

Again and again, Scripture confronts our assumption that God’s work is carried by people with unbroken lives.

What This Means When Your Life Isn’t “Neat”

So if you feel your life isn’t turning out the way you planned—if there is heartache and heartbreak, disappointment, waiting, broken paths and broken dreams—don’t despair. These are the people God chooses to display his glory, who reveal his character, often in ways they cannot understand.

“We have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7)

That is a reason to rejoice in our weakness—not because weakness is good, but because God is. Don’t assume that your disappointments and years of waiting mean God is absent, or that the hard things in your lives won’t ultimately work for your good. Your waiting may feel wasted, but it is not meaningless to God. Even what feels like wasted time has a purpose in God’s hands.

Remind yourself regularly that God has great things in store for you, for all of us who love him. He promises, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

One day we will see that God has been writing a better story than the one we would have chosen—or even imagined.

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