There is nothing quite like walking up to a ride at Six Flags, seeing a sign that says, “Your wait time is 1 hour and 20 minutes,” and thinking, “Well, this seems reasonable.”
Reasonable? You are about to spend nearly ninety minutes of your life waiting for a ride that will be over in four minutes—five, if they are feeling generous—and yet, into the line you go.
At first, you are hopeful. Maybe the sign is wrong. Maybe the line moves fast. Maybe everyone ahead of you suddenly decides roller coasters are not really their thing.
Ten minutes in, you are still cheerful. Twenty minutes in, you are starting to wonder why the same trash can keeps appearing beside you. Thirty minutes in, someone needs the bathroom. Forty minutes in, someone is hungry. Fifty minutes in, one child has completely lost the will to live. The parents in front of you are staring into the distance with the hollow eyes of people who have already spent forty-seven dollars on drinks and a pretzel.
And somehow the sign still says eighty minutes.
Now you are doing math.
“How long have we been here?”
“Surely we are halfway.”
“We cannot leave now. We have invested too much.”
At this point, you are no longer waiting for the ride. You are waiting because quitting would make the waiting feel wasted.
And honestly, that is how waiting works in life too. We do not like it. We do not enjoy it. We would appreciate a fast pass, a progress report, and maybe a text from heaven saying, “You are almost there.”
But most of the time, we get none of that.
We just wait.
And somewhere in the middle of it, we start checking the line beside us and playing the comparison game. Their door opened. Their prayer was answered. Their next chapter started. Meanwhile, we are still standing beside the same trash can, wondering how everyone else seems to be moving while our line has barely budged.
Isaiah 40:31 promises something for people who wait like that:
“Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” (NIV).
The Hebrew word behind “wait” in that verse is qavah. It carries the meaning of waiting, hoping, and expecting, and its root has also been connected to the picture of strands being twisted tightly together like a cord.
I love that visual because it means waiting is not empty wasted time.
It is the place where our hope becomes wrapped around God.
Where our strength is joined to His.
Where trust grows tighter, strand by strand, while we are still standing in a place we would rather have moved beyond by now.
The waiting and the renewed strength are connected. God is doing something in the line that the four-minute ride never could. He is teaching us how to stay close when we cannot see how much longer it will be. He is strengthening what would have remained weak if everything had happened immediately. He is wrapping our hope around who He is while we are still waiting to see what He will do.
And then, one day, you finally reach the front.
The gate opens.
You climb in.
The ride takes off, and suddenly everyone is laughing. You hear your kids squealing. You are twisting, spinning, dropping, and grinning like this is the greatest thing that has ever happened to you.
Four minutes later, you step off the ride completely transformed. Everyone is happy. Everyone is talking at once. Someone says, “That was amazing!” And somehow, the eighty-minute wait that nearly destroyed the family has already started fading into the background.
Is that not exactly what happens when some of our waiting seasons finally end?
The door opens. The answer comes. The provision shows up. The thing you have prayed about finally moves. Joy rushes in so quickly that the long wait begins to look different from the other side.
You see what God was doing.
You recognize how He strengthened you.
You realize the waiting was not wasted, even when it felt painfully slow.
And there you are, smiling like a person who was not just complaining beside a trash can for the last eighty minutes.
Without fail, we look around and say:
“Whoa, God. You did it again.”