There is a particular kind of hard that comes not from the worst moment, but from the moment after it. Not the diagnosis, but the days that follow. Not the loss itself, but the long stretch of silence where you keep asking and the answer doesn't come the way you need it to.
The waiting is its own season. And if we are honest, it is often the hardest one.
Why Waiting Feels Like Abandonment
When we are in pain and our prayers seem to go unanswered, it is frighteningly easy to interpret God's silence as indifference. We reason: if He cared, He would have acted by now. If He was powerful, He would have intervened. And so the waiting begins to feel like evidence against Him rather than evidence of something we simply cannot yet see.
I have been there. I have sat with that feeling in the dark and let it speak louder than it should have. I want to tell you: the silence is not His absence. It is often the place where He is doing His most deliberate work.
What the Waiting Is Doing
I have come to believe that the waiting is not wasted time. It is formative time. It is the place where our faith gets tested and where we discover what we actually believe when the comfortable certainties are stripped away.
When I was going through treatment, there were stretches of time where I genuinely did not know what was coming. I could not see the path forward. And in those stretches, I found that my faith had to become less about outcomes and more about relationship. Less about what God was going to do and more about who God is. That shift—from outcomes to identity—is the work of the waiting.
You cannot manufacture it. You cannot shortcut it. You can only move through it, and as you do, you find that something is being built in you that could not have been built any other way.
How to Surrender Without Giving Up
There is an important distinction between surrendering to God and giving up on hope. Surrender is not resignation. It is not saying nothing matters or that you have stopped caring. It is saying: I am going to stop trying to manage the outcome and trust the One who holds it.
Practically, for me, surrender looked like praying differently. Instead of bringing God a list of what I needed Him to do by when, I began to simply show up. I told Him I was scared. I told Him I was tired. I told Him I trusted Him—even on the days when that felt like the hardest thing I had ever said out loud. And I stopped trying to figure out how the story was going to resolve.
That kind of surrender is not weakness. It is one of the bravest things a person can do.
If you are in the waiting right now, you are not forgotten. You are not stuck. You are in one of the most sacred stretches of your story. And the One who called you into it is in it with you—closer than the silence feels, more faithful than the fear suggests.
Keep waiting. Keep trusting. The answer is coming.