It always starts the same way.
You haven’t prayed in weeks—maybe months—but now you need something. Really need something. So you dust off your best “Dear God,” try to sound humble but urgent and hope that this time He’ll come through. Maybe you even throw in a little bargaining: If You just make this happen, I’ll… read my Bible every day. Start tithing. Quit doomscrolling at 2 a.m.
And then? Silence.
Meanwhile, someone else—someone who wasn’t even trying—gets exactly what you were asking for. You applied to 30 jobs and your friend lands an offer after casually mentioning to their uncle that they were “kind of looking.” You’ve been praying about a relationship for years and your coworker gets engaged to the first person they met on Hinge.
It’s hard not to take it personally. Hard not to feel like God is ignoring you or worse, like He’s playing some kind of cruel joke. But if we’re honest, it’s not just the waiting that makes us anxious—it’s the fact that we only seem to talk to God when we need something.
Dr. Richard Beck, a professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University, calls this “transactional faith”—the belief that if we do the right things, God will respond with blessings. “It’s an economic model,” he writes in Stranger God. “You put in obedience and get out divine favor. But faith that is only transactional will fail the moment God doesn’t ‘pay up.’”
And that’s the issue. Our faith, for many of us, has been shaped less by trust and more by expectation. We trust as long as the outcome is what we hoped for. We pray as long as we see results. We keep believing—until God’s timeline starts to feel like a joke.
But Scripture has a long history of people feeling exactly like this. Take the psalmists, for example, who regularly called out God for His infuriating timing. “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1). Or the exasperated frustration of Habakkuk: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?” (Habakkuk 1:2). These aren’t sanitized, picture-perfect prayers. They’re raw, impatient, real.
That alone should tell us something—frustration with God’s timing isn’t a failure of faith. It’s part of it.
And yet, these same biblical figures kept praying. Kept trusting. Not because they always saw immediate results but because they had faith in who God was, not just what He could do.
It’s a stark contrast to the way many of us approach prayer. Studies in psychology show that people tend to rely on religious beliefs most intensely in moments of crisis. Dr. Kenneth Pargament, a psychologist who specializes in the study of religion and coping, calls this “situational spirituality”—the tendency to engage deeply with faith when we need something, only to disengage when life is smooth again. “Religion becomes a last-ditch effort rather than a daily practice,” he explains. “People see God as a crisis manager rather than a companion.”
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t pray in difficult moments. Jesus Himself prayed intensely in Gethsemane, pleading for another way (Luke 22:42). But His prayers weren’t just in times of crisis. He had a rhythm of retreating to pray, a habit of being with the Father outside of miracles and major events. It wasn’t transactional—it was relational.
What if our faith worked like that? What if prayer wasn’t just a lifeline in emergencies but a practice in the ordinary? What if trusting God wasn’t about holding out for a reward but about knowing He’s still good even when we don’t get what we asked for?
This isn’t a new concept, but it is a hard one to live out. Henri Nouwen once wrote, “Waiting is never passive. It is an active discipline of hope.” But we often don’t see it that way. Waiting feels inactive, inefficient, pointless. We want results. We want action. We want God to do something already.
And yet, some of the most powerful stories in Scripture are about people who had to sit in the discomfort of waiting. Abraham and Sarah waited decades for a promise that seemed impossible. Joseph spent years in a prison cell before stepping into his purpose. The Israelites wandered in the wilderness long enough to make their grandkids question if God had a plan at all.
We love to talk about these stories in hindsight because we know how they end. But what about when we’re the ones waiting—without a guarantee of a perfect resolution?
That’s where trust gets real.
Because if we’re only in this for the answers, for the rewards, for the relief of seeing things finally work out, we’re still making it transactional. We’re still treating Him like a genie. And when we don’t get what we want, we’ll keep cycling through disappointment, bitterness or apathy.
But trust built in the in-between is different. It’s steadier. Less fragile. It doesn’t fall apart every time life doesn’t go according to plan. People who have learned to pray in the ordinary don’t panic in the silence. Their faith doesn’t collapse when the miracle doesn’t come on schedule because they weren’t relying on an outcome—they were relying on God.
The hard truth is that sometimes, we won’t get what we asked for. The door will stay closed. The waiting will stretch longer than we think we can bear. But that doesn’t mean God has abandoned us. It just means He’s God—and we’re not.
Faith was never meant to be a vending machine, where the right combination of good behavior and belief spits out the thing we want. It’s meant to be a relationship. One that doesn’t collapse the moment we hit a season of waiting. One that isn’t built on a bargain. One that holds steady even when the timing feels like a joke.
Because faith isn’t proven in the moments when God says yes. It’s proven in the moments when He doesn’t.
God’s not a genie. And honestly, that’s the best news we could ask for.
