Jade and Alex met as children in the foster care system, overcoming obstacles and beating the many odds stacked against them. Over the years, people and life disappointed them. Yet, the one thing they could always count on was each other. Even when jobs and school separated them, they always found their way back to each other. Seven years ago, they stood before a justice of the peace vowing never to give up on each other or themselves.
Then a tragic accident leaves one of them fighting to live. The other is thrust into the role of caregiver to a patient whose body, mind, and faith were all left broken.
Will their marriage survive the hardship and mental torment of trauma or will the In Sickness and In Health part of the vows shatter when they are put to the test?
During your waiting season, God does 3 things. He prunes, prepares then promotes.
Someone may ask, why does it hurt? Well, pruning is removing anything dead, damaged, or can compete with your growth. Preparation includes stretching ensuring you have room for said growth. Both come with a little pain because here’s the hard truth. Some of you have stuff in your background that’s damaged, dead, and competing with your purpose.
You break down when folk don’t show up like they promised. It’s a trigger to all the times people didn’t show up for you in your past or you were abandoned. You’re afraid of letting go because times before nobody was there to catch you. You’re angry from all the things you’ve had to experience and it wasn’t even your fault. The depression, self-doubt, fear … you’ve got to heal otherwise you’ll bleed all over the folk God sent you to lead.
God needs you beloved, but He can’t send you as you are. Otherwise, you may damage those God sent you to deliver. God can’t position you in leadership and you’re still getting mad and acting out of character when things happen. Baby, things will happen and you have to know how to handle it. Yet, you can’t if you’re still being triggered by stuff you’re afraid to cut away.
God needs to prune and prepare you, otherwise what you’ve been sent to grow, will die. That’s why the waiting season is important, but you may miss it while complaining instead of confirming God’s plan for your life.
Watch our latest sermon and Bible Studies from the April series, Waiting Room. Follow Tenple Church’s Facebook page, visit our website to learn more about us, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
Sometimes, as Christians, we can become depressed, and feel forgotten or forsaken when things don’t happen right away. We’ll get frustrated when we witness others being blessed with the very things we’ve been praying and preparing for. But what if, maybe, this is your season to wait? You do realize we don’t go right from planting to harvesting, right? There will be a wait.
This month God gave me the series Waiting Room. Yet, here’s a few things I want to point out about the spiritual waiting room.
A waiting room is usually found in a place where you need a service. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need to be.
A waiting room isn’t the place for you to stay. You can get comfortable but don’t lose focus on the why. You are here to wait, not stay.
A waiting room isn’t where you’ll get the results. The waiting room is only a temporary holding point between hearing God’s promise and it being fulfilled.
While in the waiting room, you need to act like you have sense. In other words, wait well. Stop complaining, gossiping, lying, etc. God pays attention to how we wait and treat people.
Don’t be moved when you see others going ahead of you. You don’t know what they’re waiting for nor who they are “seeing.”
Act like you know … Your time will soon come!
How will you act in the waiting room?
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“But as for me, I will look to the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.” Micah 7:7
A lot of times it’s not God isn’t hearing or responding because He’s forgotten us. The issue is, we’re unsure of the season. Contrary to what we have come to know, not every season is a season to reap. If all you’re doing is reaping, when will you plant? When will you rest? When will you be pruned?
The same way there are seasons, naturally, we experience seasons spiritually. The problem … we don’t know what season we’re in.
How do you know your season? By praying, fasting, and asking God.
What’s the benefit of knowing the season? So we do the proper work for THAT season. If we don’t, we’ll be in the season of planting, believing we’re supposed to reap and now we’ve forfeited the season with no seeds in the ground. (Seeds = God’s word, not money.) We must know the season or we’ll start believing the enemy whose job is to put opposition between us and God.
Last month at Temple Church we learned about sowing seeds. (You have to plant to reap.) This month, we’re in our series Waiting Room. Some of us are in the waiting season, yet we’ve come to believe God is punishing us because we aren’t seeing a harvest. No baby. What God is actually doing or trying to do, is prune, and prepare you to promote you. Yet, God can’t do the work because you don’t want to wait.
This is why you have to stop counting the seconds and start recognizing your season.
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Three years ago, I had the privilege to be the guest blogger for my friend Pastor David Foster’s blog, The Love Connexion. Although it’s been three years, the post still fits today. So, I wanted to share it here for somebody, whomever you are. Even if it’s not for you, it may be for someone you know.
Stop comparing your marriage to others. This is YOUR marriage.
My grandparents were married 65 years before my grandfather passed away. He and my Grams (as I called her) were thirteen and fifteen when they married. Mere children and somehow, they managed to stay together all those years. Lean in, it wasn’t easy. See, during the era of my grandparents, you rarely heard of people divorcing. Oh, they’d separate but divorcing really wasn’t a thing. Through raising children that ran into the double digits, most times, to struggling to overcome racism and poverty; marriage wasn’t easy.
But you know this, right? You know the strains and struggle. You know the burdens. You know the sacrifices. You know the weight. Then why are you trying to build your marriage on the backs of your grandparents when you don’t know the half of what it took to make it? Your marriage is your marriage and what worked for them, might not work for you.
Pause and allow me to clarify something … Every marriage is different. I will never tell anyone to stay in a marriage and put up with some of the things my grandparents endured while married in their era. I’m only sharing to encourage you to find what works for your marriage in order to sustain it for 60+ years.
You know why I can share? I’ve been married 22 years, since I was 21 years old. I know the strains of marriage. I know about infidelity, struggle, debt, him not liking me and I couldn’t stand him. I know the harshness of marriage and moving back with my grandparents when I was over it. See, I thought marriage was what I saw in my grandparents. As long as I did my part as the wife, he’d do his part as the husband. As long as we both contributed, came home and functioned things would work. Man was I wrong. Marriage is a whole lot more.
It’s sacrificing, giving, going, shutting up when necessary, speaking up when you have to, apologizing, being, doing, believing, struggling, overcoming, loving, trusting, honoring, praying, fasting, covering, shielding, protecting, compromising, warring in the sprit, destroying yokes, ___________ (you fill in the blank).
This is why you have to stop expecting your marriage to mimic what you saw grandma and granddad or others in your family do. Your marriage isn’t your grandparent’s marriage. YOU AIN’T BUILT THE SAME! Yeah, I said it. We give up to easy. We throw the deuces as soon as times get hard. We want the forty-thousand-dollar wedding and two-dollar marriage. We argue and put other folk in the business. We get angry and go to social media. Baby, this isn’t your grandparent’s marriage. They were married at 15, raising ten and twenty children off one income in a 3-bedroom house. We got the houses with multiple rooms and yet we’ll still storm out the house after an argument.
Read this carefully … when I say your marriage isn’t your grandparent’s marriage, neither is it your parent’s, his/her parent’s, your sister/brother’s, best friend’s, pastor’s, or anybody else marriage. This is your marriage. You and your spouse have to create a marriage that works for the both of you. Sure, it may look different than what you’ve been accustomed to seeing, that’s okay. Sure, it may not be the way self-help books portrayed, that’s alright. It might not look like the happily ever after movies, it wasn’t meant to.
Your marriage is your marriage. DO WHAT KEEPS YOU AND YOUR SPOUSE HAPPY.
If this means changing your thinking, so be it.
If this means marriage counseling, so be it.
If this means different traditions, so be it.
If this means moving, so be it.
You owe it to yourself and each other because the length of a marriage means nothing when you’re both on opposite ends of it. Marriage isn’t about being perfect. Marriage isn’t about worshipping him or bowing down to her. Marriage isn’t happy wife, happy life … marriage is healthy spouses, surviving houses. It’s about loving each other enough to ensure you’re meeting each other’s needs. Marriage is caring for the other when they’re sick, knowing when something is off by their tone or knowing what they will or will not eat. Marriage is about compromise and making choices together. Marriage is about getting angry but not leaving and admitting when you’re wrong. Marriage is apologizing and saying I love you. Marriage is about the simple things like getting to your car to see your husband has made sure to put your umbrella in there because it’s raining and today is your beauty shop day. Marriage is when your wife doesn’t fuss every time you leave the toilet seat up.
Marriage isn’t for show, but it should be for sure. And if you get nothing else from this, glean one point … your marriage is YOUR marriage.
Ephesians 5:33, “Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”
Lakisha, the Author 