A Word for Everyone Tired of Waiting on God's Promises.

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick…”

— Proverbs 13:12

How many times have you repeated this to yourself recently? It's been about 3,000 for me! I don’t know about you but in this past year, I have turned my face towards heaven and said, “God, it’s been YEARS of hope deferred. My heart isn’t just sick, IT’S EXHAUSTED. Do you see this?!!!”

I've prayed, taken many steps, and obeyed what was needed in this season. And yet… delay continued.

It has been such a disillusioning time, but on this past Resurrection Sunday, I felt something shift in my spirit.

As I woke up with a heavy heart as I started my day, I heard clearly: “Hope deferred is hope refined.”

I stopped in my tracks, and everything in me exhaled, and my shoulders weren't up to my ears anymore. You mean to tell me there's more than just walking around with an internal cloud of hopelessness? I had been reciting the first part of this verse so long that I forgot it wasn't the entirety of the verse. Rumination like this happens when we decide it's more comfortable to complain rather than challenge the fear we feel.

This quiet moment snatched me out of seeing hope deferred as an illness but as an opportunity for deeper spiritual alignment. This was MUUUUUUCH needed after wallowing in a sick heart.

If you’ve ever lived in the tension between what God promised and what you’re currently experiencing, let me be your example that hope deferred is not the end of your journey.

When Hope Feels Like It’s Breaking You

Let’s be real. Hope deferred doesn’t just disappoint. It can feel like it’s literally breaking you from the inside out.

It raises questions we don’t always say out loud:

• “Did I hear God wrong?”

• “Why is this so hard for me but easy for everybody else?”

• “Am I being punished or forgotten?”

• “What did I do to deserve this?”

As a person who deeply values alignment, purpose, and a return on my effort, this season challenged me in ways that made me want to throw up. I believed that my obedience would produce pretty immediate results, not resistance from every angle.

But what I’ve come to understand is this:

Delay is not the absence of God. It’s often the evidence that He’s uprooting deeper things that have been blinding you, binding you, and burying you.

The Refinement Process

When God spoke, “Hope deferred is hope refined,” I realized something powerful. Refinement means purification. It means removing what cannot sustain the weight of what you’re asking for.

That means:

• Hope that was tied to timelines gets refined into hope rooted in confident expectation. You will set yourself up for a lifetime of bitterness if everything has to meet your timelines. You don't know everything and can't always prepare for the unexpected. Hope has legs when you change your focus from what you can see to who HE is.  

• Hope that depended on external validation gets refined into internal peace. True maturity and safety come when you can be in the eye of the storm instead of being swept up by it. In the past few months I used to say, "I may implode if one more thing happens to me." That's an example of hope based on external validation. Getting plugged into the original source helped me to walk in peace from the inside out - no matter what anyone else, my circumstances, or the economy was doing. This is where changemakers are born!  
  

• Hope that was fragile becomes unshakeable. If we get tossed to and fro with every unmet expectation, how can we be trusted to lead initiatives, teams, and kingdom business? At some point, we need to step up in order to successfully step out.

Refined hope doesn’t say, “God, when will this happen?”

It says, “God, let’s do this even if the world outside is melting!”

And that’s the kind of faith that can dissolve mountains.

Two books I’ve read that helped me see the refinement process as a gift instead of a curse are Crushing by TD Jakes and my current read Girls With Swords by Lisa Bevere. If you're a self-starter who feels like you've been doing everything "correctly" but continue to be smacked in the face by life's circumstances, these reads provide realistic anchors to hold on to when your thoughts can't be trusted. Both have helped me see that my struggles are not the perpetual punishment of a mistake I made, but part of the journey of having authority over any problem that comes my way!

Resurrection Perspective

I know it’s not a coincidence that this revelation came on Resurrection Sunday. If there was ever a moment where hope looked completely lost, it was when Jesus was in the tomb. To those who were there in real time, hope was not just deferred - it looked dead!

But what they didn’t know was that God was working in the unseen. And three days later, what looked like delay was actually the ultimate breakthrough in process!

This is your blueprint, too.

What This Means for You

If you’re in a season where your hope feels sick or even non-existent, I want to offer you this reframe:

You are not being punished. You are being prepared and shaped into a warrior.

I know that might sound like a spiritual platitude, and honestly, I would have rolled my eyes at this a year ago, too. However, you've got to ask yourself what outcome you actually want. How is skepticism working for you? I checked my track record, and it didn't make me one iota more successful than the position of complaining I was in.

The second half of that verse says, "but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life". You cannot experience the return on your hope investment if you amplify the pain of the wait! Fulfillment is attainable with refined hope. It's also pretty difficult to be consumed by external pressure in this position.

A New Declaration

In this season, I’ve stopped saying, “God, why is this taking so long?”

Instead, I’m declaring:

“God, thank You for refining my hope so I can sustain what You’re bringing.”

When you let God build through refinement, you receive breakthrough that lasts.

And THAT is worth the wait...

What will you let delay refine in you? Let me know in the comments!