Waiting with Open Hands

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 35

“Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.” — Psalm 27:14 (NIV)

Good morning, beloved in Christ! We are standing in the final hours of an extraordinary season. The weeks of Lent that have brought us to this place have done their work: they have pressed us toward honesty, toward surrender, toward community, toward the cross. And now, with Holy Week drawing within reach, there is one more posture this journey asks of us before we cross into the holiest days of the year. It is the posture of waiting with open hands.

Waiting is not something our culture does well. We have been trained to fill every silence, to resolve every uncertainty, to move at a pace that leaves little room for the kind of unhurried, expectant stillness that Scripture consistently commends. And yet the people of God have always been a waiting people. Abraham waited for the promised son. Joseph waited through the pit and the prison. Israel waited through four hundred years of slavery. The prophets waited for a Messiah whose arrival most of them never lived to see. Waiting, in the biblical sense, is never passive resignation. It is active, faith-filled expectation directed at a God who is always moving toward the fulfillment of His promises.

Psalm 27:14 (NIV) gives us the rhythm of it: “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.” The repetition is deliberate. Wait. Be strong. Take heart. Wait again. The psalmist knew that waiting on God is not a single act but a sustained posture, something we have to return to again and again as impatience and anxiety and the noise of the world pull us away from it. But the one who learns to wait on the Lord is the one who discovers what Psalm 27:13 (NIV) declares just before it: “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” Confidence and waiting are not opposites in the life of faith. They are companions.

What Open Hands Receive

The image of open hands is important. Closed hands clutch what they already have and cannot receive anything new. Open hands release what they have been gripping and make room for what God wants to give. This Lenten season has been, in many ways, an extended invitation to open our hands: to release our self-sufficiency, our pride, our unconfessed sin, our unforgiveness, our need to control outcomes, our preference for a comfortable faith over a costly one. Each week has asked us to let go of something. And with each release, the hands have opened a little wider.

Isaiah 64:4 (NIV) captures what open-handed waiting makes possible: “Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.” God acts on behalf of those who wait for Him. Not those who have figured everything out. Not those who have managed to hold themselves together through sheer determination. Those who wait. Those who have stopped striving long enough to place themselves, with open hands, before the God who sees and moves and fulfills every promise He has ever made.

The prophet Micah stood in the ruins of his own expectations, watching the structures he had trusted crumble, and he made a declaration that rings through the centuries as one of the purest expressions of waiting faith ever written: “But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me” (Micah 7:7, NIV). But as for me. That phrase always appears in Scripture as a pivot, a deliberate turning away from circumstances and toward the character of God. Micah could not control what was happening around him. But he could choose where he fixed his eyes. And he fixed them on the Lord, watching in hope, confident that his God would hear him.

The Gift of These Final Hours

These final hours before Holy Week are not empty time to be filled or hurried

through. They are a gift. They are the quiet before the music swells, the stillness before the storm breaks, the held breath before the most extraordinary week of the Christian year unfolds. Use them well. Let the work that Lent has done in your heart settle a little deeper. Bring before God whatever is still unresolved, whatever you have been carrying that was never yours to carry, whatever hope or fear or question you have been holding that needs to be placed in hands far more capable than your own.

Romans 8:25 (NIV) gives us a picture of what this kind of waiting looks like from the inside: “But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Patiently does not mean passively. It means with the settled, enduring confidence of a soul that knows who holds tomorrow. The disciples who would walk into Jerusalem with Jesus in just a few days did not yet know what the week would hold. They could not have imagined the darkness of Friday or the silence of Saturday. But they walked beside the One who knew it all, and that was enough. We walk in the same company today.

As we stand at the edge of Holy Week with open hands and expectant hearts, let us fix our eyes on the One who makes the waiting worthwhile. Jesus Christ, who set His face toward Jerusalem with full knowledge of everything that awaited Him, is the reason we can wait with confidence rather than dread. He has already walked through the worst that this week holds and come out the other side in resurrection glory. Whatever we are waiting for, whatever we are holding with open hands before God, we bring it to a Savior who has conquered the grave. Our waiting is never without hope. It is always, always anchored in Him.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, as I stand at the threshold of these final and holiest days, I want to come before You with open hands. I release to You the things I have been clutching too tightly: the outcomes I have been trying to control, the fears I have been carrying alone, the questions I have not yet been able to answer, and the hopes I have not yet dared to voice. I choose to wait for You, not with resignation but with active, faith-filled expectation, confident that You see me, that You hear me, and that You are always moving toward the fulfillment of every promise You have made.

Lord, prepare my heart for what is coming. Let these final quiet hours before Holy Week do something lasting in me. Make me ready to walk with Jesus through every day of the week ahead, from the Hosannas of Palm Sunday to the darkness of Good Friday, trusting that the silence of Saturday is never the end of the story. I wait for You with confidence, because everything You have promised, You have kept. In the name of Jesus, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, I pray, Amen.

Holy Week is nearly here. You have walked thirty-five days of this journey, and not a single step has been wasted. Open your hands. Lift your eyes. The God who has been faithful through every week of this season is about to show you, in the most vivid and costly way possible, just how faithful He truly is.

To God be the glory.

Pray, praise, and give thanks, for God is good and His mercy endures forever.

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