Split open a butterfly’s cocoon too early, thinking you’re helping it along, and you’ll find something far from ready — a half-formed creature, wings crumpled and useless, unable to fly for the rest of its short life. What looks like stillness from the outside, that dull brown casing hanging motionless from a branch, is actually the most intensely active season of the entire creature’s life.
Cells are dissolving and reorganizing into something the caterpillar never was and never could have built by trying harder. The waiting isn’t empty time before the real work begins. The waiting is the real work — just work you cannot see or rush.
Abraham spent twenty-five years inside exactly that kind of waiting room.
A Promise Given at Seventy-Five
God’s promise to Abraham came early, clear, and specific:
“Now the LORD had said to Abram: ‘Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation… So Abram departed as the LORD had spoken to him.” — Genesis 12:1, 4, NKJV
Genesis tells us plainly Abram was seventy-five years old when he received this promise (Genesis 12:4). And the promised son, the one through whom that “great nation” would come — Isaac — wasn’t born until Abraham was a hundred (Genesis 21:5). Twenty-five years. Not twenty-five days of dramatic testing, not a single agonizing night of prayer, but a quarter of a century spent inside a promise that had been spoken clearly and had not yet visibly moved an inch.
What Happened Inside the Waiting
Scripture doesn’t hide what those years actually looked like from the inside. They weren’t peaceful. Abraham and Sarah tried to manufacture the promise themselves through Hagar, producing Ishmael and a family conflict that echoes to this day (Genesis 16:1-4). Abraham, twice, lied about Sarah being his sister out of fear for his own life, nearly losing her to two different foreign kings (Genesis 12:11-13; 20:2). Sarah herself laughed bitterly at the promise when it was finally restated to her directly, her body long past childbearing years by any human measure (Genesis 18:11-12). This was not a serene, patient couple gliding calmly through a waiting room. This was two frightened, doubting, sometimes faithless people, still somehow held inside a promise they couldn’t fully believe yet couldn’t fully let go of either.
And yet Paul, looking back centuries later, describes something else happening underneath all that visible mess:
“And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead (since he was about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah’s womb. He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God.“ — Romans 4:19-20, NKJV
Read that carefully against what Genesis actually records — the lies, the scheme with Hagar, Sarah’s laughter. Paul isn’t describing a man who never doubted. He’s describing what was happening at the deepest level, underneath the doubt, the way a cocoon is doing real transformation underneath a dull, motionless shell. The waiting room wasn’t wasted time even when it looked like failure from the outside.
The Waiting Was Named as Faith, Not Despite the Struggle
Hebrews goes even further, listing Sarah herself, laughter and all, in the great roll call of faith:
“By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised.“ — Hebrews 11:11, NKJV
She judged Him faithful. Not “she never doubted.” Not “she waited perfectly.” She judged Him faithful — a settled conclusion reached, apparently, sometime during those twenty-five uncertain years, even though her first recorded response to the promise had been a laugh she then denied out of fear (Genesis 18:15). Faith, in this account, was never the absence of struggle inside the waiting room. It was the conclusion that outlasted the struggle.
A Story Worth Sitting With
I know a couple who spent eleven years trying to conceive, through the same kind of mixture Abraham and Sarah lived — real prayer alongside real doubt, real trust alongside real attempts to force outcomes their own way, several rounds of treatment that failed, and more than one season where they quietly stopped attending baby dedications at church because the ache had become too heavy to sit through. Nobody watching them during those years would have called it a triumphant walk of faith. It looked, most days, like exhausted endurance at best. Their daughter was eventually born when the wife was forty-three, and the father has said since that if he’s honest, he doesn’t remember the moment his own faith became settled — he only knows that somewhere in that long middle stretch, without a specific turning point he can point to, he stopped needing an explanation and simply kept showing up to the waiting, day after day. The transformation, as far as he can tell, happened in the part of those eleven years he couldn’t see or account for at the time.
There’s a proverb worth carrying into any waiting room: patience can cook a stone until it’s soft. Not because the stone changes quickly, or because the process is comfortable to watch. Because time, rightly endured, does what force cannot.
What This Doesn’t Mean
This isn’t a promise that every wait ends the way Abraham’s did, with the exact outcome hoped for arriving on schedule. Scripture is honest that not everyone’s Isaac arrives in this lifetime — plenty of the faithful in Hebrews 11 died still waiting, still trusting, having “not received the promises, but having seen them afar off” (Hebrews 11:13). The point isn’t a guarantee of outcome. It’s a reframing of what the waiting itself actually is: not a delay in the real story, but very often the real story itself, doing work no impatience could have rushed.
Five Questions Worth Sitting With
- Is there a promise I’ve been waiting on so long that I’ve quietly assumed nothing is happening?
- Have I, like Abraham with Hagar, tried to manufacture an outcome God seemed slow to bring?
- What would it look like to “judge Him faithful,” the way Sarah eventually did, even in the middle of my own doubt?
- Am I mistaking the mess of my waiting — the doubt, the fear, the failed attempts — for evidence that no real transformation is happening underneath it?
- Could I name one thing that has quietly changed in me during a season I’ve mostly just wanted to be over?
Final Word
The cocoon gives no outward sign of the transformation happening inside it, and it would tear apart entirely if the wings were forced out before their season. Abraham and Sarah’s twenty-five years looked, most days, like faithlessness rather than faith — and yet Scripture calls it faith all the same, because something real and unseen was taking shape underneath the doubt the whole time. Whatever waiting room you’re sitting in right now, however long it’s been, however little progress you can see from where you’re sitting: it may be sacred ground after all, doing in you what nothing except time in that exact room could ever do — until the Kingdom of God finally arrives in full and every waiting room, at last, empties into what it was always quietly preparing you for.
If waiting on God without wavering is a struggle you’re currently living through, I’ve written more on trusting His timing and character in Yet Will I Trust Him, available at oludareakinbo.com/my-books.
