When We Can’t Wait
What we reach for when clarity doesn’t come
There’s a moment in Exodus 32 that feels uncomfortably familiar. Moses has gone up the mountain. He’s been gone a long time. Long enough for the people to begin asking questions they can’t answer:
Where is he?
What is God doing?
Have we been left on our own?
And in that space…between promise and fulfillment, between presence and absence…they do what many of us do. They make something. A golden calf. It’sVisible. It’s Immediate. It’s Controllable.
It’s easy to read that story and shake our heads, but the deeper truth is this, the calf isn’t just about false belief but about unresolved anxiety. They don’t stop believing in God. They just can’t tolerate the waiting.
Then you turn to Gospel of Matthew 5, and you hear the words of the Beatitudes:
Blessed are the poor in spirit…
Blessed are those who mourn…
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst…
These are not people who have things figured out. They are people who are living in the very space Exodus 32 tries to escape. They are still waiting. Still longing. Still not in control. And Jesus calls them blessed. That’s the tension.
In Exodus, the people cannot bear the absence of clarity, so they fill it. In Matthew, Jesus names those who can remain in that space …and calls them alive in a deeper way.
There’s a quiet question running underneath both readings. What do you do when God feels absent, slow, or unclear? Do you reach for something—anything—to steady yourself? Do you construct meaning, certainty, or control just to quiet the discomfort?
Or…
Do you stay?
Staying doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means resisting the urge to resolve what isn’t ready to be resolved. It means allowing longing to remain longing…without immediately converting it into action. It means trusting that not all absence is abandonment.
The golden calf offers relief…but only for a moment. The Beatitudes offer something harder… a way of being that doesn’t depend on immediate resolution.
Most of us don’t build literal idols. But we do build timelines and expectations. We build narratives about how things should unfold.
And when those don’t materialize, the temptation is the same. Create something we can hold onto instead. But what if blessedness isn’t found in finally getting clarity What if it’s found in learning how to live without it?
This week, you might not need to fix anything. You might just need to notice where you’re trying to force an outcome… and gently loosen your grip. Not everything unfinished is broken. Not everything unclear needs to be resolved. Some things are still becoming. And sometimes, faith looks less like building something new… and more like staying present long enough for God to meet you there.