When You’ve Done Everything and You’re Still Waiting

When You’ve Done Everything and You’re Still Waiting

What do you do when you have asked, sought, and knocked, and the door still hasn’t opened? Candace and Annie F. Downs spend most of this conversation dealing with that question, the one most people would rather move past quickly.

When You’ve Done Everything and Nothing Moves

Annie names the part of Don’t Let That Hold You Back that she kept bumping into while she wrote it: you can do all the work the book describes, but there are no promises. She decided she could not honestly tell her readers to do all of it without also telling them it guarantees nothing. Candace is honest with her thoughts: she likes it when the world runs on A plus B equals C, and most of the time it doesn’t, at least not when we want it to.

Annie’s Forty-Five Years

Annie talks about dating for a long time before she married JW in her 40s. She went to counseling, hired dating coaches, paid a matchmaker, dated online, and relied on her friends to set her up. As she puts it, the only people who didn’t know she wanted to get married were the people she hadn’t met yet. For a long time she kept thinking more money would solve it, that a higher-end matchmaker would finally help her find the right guy.

The lesson she finally learned was that the thing holding her back was never something she could control.

The Waiting Was the Journey

Candace shares about her own years at home with her kids, a season she chose and was fully committed to, even while other dreams stayed on a shelf. She traces the growth in her relationship with God during that time, growth that later shaped how she returned to work, seeing her work life as a place to point people one step closer to Jesus. Annie reframes the whole idea: sometimes the waiting isn’t the delay before the journey, the waiting is the journey. The two of them keep returning to one question: can you find fulfillment in what you have while you wait for what you want? Can you be grateful for the basket you are holding while wishing there were more fruit in it?

The Wrung-Out Washcloth

Annie describes writing her advent devotional for single women, Stay Tuned, in a Starbucks two years ago, telling God she didn’t want to write for single women anymore. What she saw in her mind was a washcloth being wrung out, and the sense that this is only a season. The night before her first date with JW, she prayed that if she and God were not finished serving single women, she would keep waiting. Here is the wisdom she offers: when you’ve done everything you can do, will you let God squeeze everything he can out of the life you have today before he hands you the next one?

Four Listeners, One Question

The listener questions all share a common theme. Juliana, a 21-year-old stay-at-home mom, is struggling to find true friends; Candace remembers being a young mom in a new city and starting her own Bible study with a note on a community board, and finding some of her closest friends among women decades older.

Sunshine likes a Christian guy and finds herself thinking about him more than about God, and Annie and Candace walk through the difference between attraction and making someone an idol.

Megan became a believer years into her marriage, and her husband hasn’t; Candace points to the writer of 1 Peter 3:1, where a wife can win her husband without a word by her conduct, and shares that her own mom prayed more than 30 years for her dad.

Tia asks how to find a safe friend, and Annie offers a line Candace hasn’t heard before: give people your dreams before you give them your pain, and watch how they handle the smaller trust first.

The hope they keep returning to is simple. God could surprise you tomorrow, so don’t walk away today. Keep praying, and live like today might be the day everything changes. That is how you learn to wait after you’ve done everything you can.

Sponsors mentioned in this episode: 316 Financial (bank316.com); CrowdHealth (joincrowdhealth.com, code Candace); International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (ifcj.org/candace); Grand Canyon University (gcu.edu); Nello (drinknello.com, code Candace); and the Together community (candace.com).