Patience is a virtue, or so they say. But little else causes such immense frustration as having to wait: waiting for someone to text us back, waiting for the line to move at the grocery store, the light to turn green—and the front car to pay attention and actually go!—waiting for the next Star Wars movie to be released, or waiting for Disney Plus to connect so your kid can choose his Darth Vader profile icon. Can you tell my family’s pain points? We hate to wait.
Yet waiting is often the solution professionals provide concerned parents when they notice their children aren’t meeting milestones or seem to be behind the mark. These three words “wait and see” offer little hope and have actually meant the difference between life and death for some families, between successful early intervention and regression, or simply never catching up. Practically every special-needs parent I know carries guilt and resentment over listening to the prescription of “wait and see.”
Parents of children with severe speech delays and physical and behavioral issues were told to “wait and see” because most kids eventually talk in their own time. Behavioral issues will work themselves out because all kids act out in their own way. Parents were assured their toddler that half-crawled by using only one arm and leg wouldn’t crawl down the aisle at their wedding. “Don’t worry,” they said. “It’ll be fine,” they said.
“Just wait and see.”
Special needs families are no strangers to waiting. Waiting lists are several months long just to get an evaluation done, if a disability is not readily apparent. By the time an evaluation is completed, families get to wait in another invisible line to figure out what services are available, and if insurance will cover them, which means more time waiting for customer service. It feels as if our lives are turned into a giant line for a roller coaster that we don’t even want to ride; the line never seems to get any shorter, as we waste away waiting for appointments, waiting for medication and treatments to work, waiting for insurance coverage, waiting for appeals after coverage denies medically necessary treatment. Families sometimes literally wait for years for waiver services, because the waiting list is thousands of names long. Just to give you an idea of what this looks like if this isn’t your life, I applied for Sam’s name to be added to the Maryland waiver waiting list several months before we actually moved there. We lived in Maryland for six years, then two and a half years after moving away to Kentucky, his name finally came up on the list for services. Nine years of waiting for an unfulfilled promise.
We waited for nothing.
But praise be to God, not all waiting is for naught. Psalm 130 is a beautiful lament on waiting and hope, and is the foundation for the next song in the Post Tenebras, Lux series:
1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
2 O Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
3 If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could stand?
4 But with you there is forgiveness,
that you may be feared.
5 I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
6 my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.
7 O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is plentiful redemption.
8 And he will redeem Israel
from all his iniquities.
Modern-day hymn writers Matt Merker, Jordan Kauflin, Keith Getty, and Stuart Townsend all worked to produce this beautiful hymn, “I Will Wait for You” based on this Psalm of Ascent. Scholars believe these Psalms were sung as worshippers ascended the road to Jerusalem, or the Levite priests climbed the temple steps to worship. As Keith Getty describes, “Psalm 130 is often referred to as the de profundis, a Latin phrase meaning ‘out of the depths.’ The depths is both figuratively and literally an expression of the deepest canyons of the ocean and of the heart—places where light cannot reach and where any hope for finding the surface above is constantly being crushed by pressure and darkness.”
I Will Wait for You
Out of the depths I cry to You;
From darkest places I will call.
Incline Your ear to me anew,
And hear my cry for mercy, Lord.
Do you feel yourself to be in a place where light cannot reach, and hope is perpetually crushed? Living in a fallen world means living in the tension of waiting for God’s promise of “all things new” to come to fruition, while crying for mercy “out of the depths” of the storms we must weather.
Were You to count my sinful ways
How could I come before Your throne?
Yet full forgiveness meets my gaze –
I stand redeemed by grace alone.
We all are fallen, sinful people who stand in need of forgiveness. We have no rights, no status about us that allows to approach the throne of the Great I Am, except through Christ alone. We can only lift our eyes to Christ who stands as our sufficient High Priest in His death and resurrection. He is our access point to the God who saves and redeems His children only by His grace.
I will wait for You, I will wait for You,
On Your word I will rely.
I will wait for You, surely wait for You
Till my soul is satisfied.
The chorus breathes life into our weary bones, and hope fills our lungs as we sing out words that carry us to the next minute or hour. Here, to “wait” means to look for patiently, to be confident and trusting in hope. This waiting isn’t like waiting for services that may never come or will come too late. This waiting is a confident expectation that it will happen. Sometimes we are truly living minute to minute. In those pain-filled anxious minutes, we must preach to ourselves that the Lord is coming. He is working, even though we can’t see it. We have to remind ourselves daily and hourly if necessary that we can rely on His Word. His Word is His promise, His guarantee, which He has sealed in us through the Holy Spirit. His promise is redemption, and redemption has come in Christ, but is also still to come in totality.
So put Your hope in God alone,
Take courage in His power to save;
Completely and forever won
By Christ emerging from the grave.
Verse 7 of the Psalm says, “O Israel, hope in the LORD!” Lamentations 3:24 says, “’The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul, ’therefore I will hope in him.’” God is the God who saves; there is no other. Christ alone has defeated death and forever won our souls for Himself. He alone is your hope. Nothing else can save. Nothing else can satisfy hearts thirsty for living water.
His steadfast love has made a way,
And God Himself has paid the price,
That all who trust in Him today
Find healing in his sacrifice.
God’s steadfast—unchanging—love for us is the reason Christ came to earth: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation…For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:15, 19, ESV). Those who trust in the Lordship and sacrifice of Christ find healing for their souls, and one day, healing of their minds and bodies as well. We may never experience earthly healing for that which debilitates us or our children. We may lose the battle of disease. We might not get medically necessary services. We may never experience true inclusion and belonging. But in Christ, we find our true belonging. In Christ, we gain that which is lost in death through eternal life.
I will wait for You, I will wait for You
Through the storm and through the night.
I will wait for You, surely wait for You,
For Your love is my delight.
There are storms we must continue to weather: long nights of breathing treatments, ER visits, changing sheets, elusive sleep, and living nightmares from which we don’t get to wake up. Yet, we wait for the Lord, for His love is our delight. The day is coming when there will be no more mourning, death, tears or de profundis—no more “depths” from which we cry. The day is coming when God finally completes the story of redemption He is writing in your life, the story He has been writing through all of creation, and finally, all things will be made new.
Just wait and see.
Sarah Broady is a wife, and mother to three boys including one with autism. She is a writer, advocate, speaker, and podcaster for her podcast, A Special Hope, available on her website, Hope in Autism and any podcast platform. You can find her on Facebook at @HopeinAutism, @ASpecialHopePodcast, on Twitter @3boys4me and @aspecialhopepod, and Instagram @aspecialhopepodcast.
