Waiting for God in the Gaps

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Mark Vroegop
Waiting on God is learning to live on what I know to be true about God, so I’m looking to him when I don’t know what’s true about my life. In those gap moments, instead of being frustrated that I’m not in control, I use them as an opportunity to hope in the Lord remind myself who he is. That’s what it means to wait on the Lord.

Courtney Doctor
Welcome to the deep dish, a podcast from the gospel coalition, where we love having deep conversations about deep truths. I’m Courtney doctor. I’m here with my friend and co host, Melissa Kruger, and our guest today is Mark Vroegop, the president, the new president, the president. We’re all excited about of the gospel coalition

Melissa Kruger
and Mark, we’re so glad you’re here today. We’re going to be talking about waiting with you. But before we do that, we would love to get to know you a little bit. Even though we have gotten to know you a little bit, we’d love for our audience to get to know you a little bit. So can you just give us a little bit about who is mark, and let our audience get to know you a little

Mark Vroegop
happy to and thanks for having me on this program. Deep dish is pretty amazing. You guys are doing a great job. So really honored to be here. So I’ve been married to my dear wife, Sarah, for over 30 years. We have four grown children. We have three adult sons who are married, which means, right now, I have three grandkids, soon to be four at the end of this month, and then have a daughter who is in college, just completed her freshman year. Happy pastor for 17 years at College Park church before taking a call to become the president of the gospel Coalition, which is like my dream job. Love to work with churches and pastors and ministry leaders all around the country, and super excited about the role that God has allowed me to be in. Done some writing, some thinking, some speaking on a variety of subjects over the last 30 years, and one we’re talking about today is pretty important in my life, because I’m really bad at it, which is why I wrote a book about it.

Courtney Doctor
It is such an important topic, isn’t it? So we’re going to be talking about waiting, and waiting is something that we wait for, little things. I was just waiting. I was kind of rushing into this conversation, and so I was waiting for my kettle to boil so I could make some tea, because I really like to have something to drink while we talk. But we wait for really big things too, and waiting can just be so hard. But do any Do either of you? I want to hear something from both of you, just a small thing that you really hate waiting for and how you respond. So mine would be traffic. I’m really not the best version of myself in traffic. It’s not it’s really where the Lord is working on sanctifying me. But what is something small that you hate waiting for?

Melissa Kruger
I was gonna say the same thing, Courtney, so I’ll just go ahead. I have a really short drive to my kids school. It should be five minutes, but in my city, that turns to 20 minutes, and it always happens to be when my child is having her soccer game. And the problem with that is I’m often late, and so I forget it’s going to now take me 20 to 25 minutes, and I’m more mad at myself, you know, I’m mad all these people live in Charlotte. I’m upset that they moved here, and they all need to go back to wherever they lived before. And so it’s just, it’s not, it’s not good. Yeah, so traffic brings it out.

Courtney Doctor
I know. What about you, Mark.

Mark Vroegop
I hate, I hate waiting on a phone call for technical support. I don’t know why it takes so long and then it it just it feels to me like it takes three times as long as what it should.

Melissa Kruger
I actually changed my answer waiting to get to a real person on that Yes. When you press all the buttons, and I’m like, 00,

Courtney Doctor
and whatever the music is, it just starts. No matter how subtle and soft it’s supposed to be, it becomes so irritating, right? Okay, well, obviously not all waiting is that trivial and not not certainly provokes us at different levels. So I love the title of the book, waiting isn’t a waste. So can you just start off by explaining what you mean by that, and then a time in your life that waiting wasn’t wasted?

Mark Vroegop
Yeah, the reason for the title is because I think that most of us have a negative bias against waiting. We don’t like it, it’s uncomfortable, it’s hard, and the society and culture in which we live is increasingly monetizing and incentivizing shorter wait times. So I think for most of us, we think and feel instinctively that when we have to wait, it’s bad, and as a result, we all. Often waste those particular gap moments, because they’re all throughout our lives. They’re actually designed by God to send some really important messages. And the Bible has all kinds of things to say, not only commending waiting, but also commanding waiting, specifically waiting on the Lord. So you ask the question, when was a time when I didn’t waste my waiting. You know, I think that in the process of trying to discern God’s calling to this role as the president of TGC, there were long seasons where just having to wait and pray and seek Him, and I look back on that season in large part because of the work that I did on the book really helped me to not I’ll put this to not waste every moment of waiting, certainly there were some, but I think I would look back on that season. I think my wife would agree that was a better than average experience of waiting on the Lord, and in large part because of the things that I learned by putting the book together.

Melissa Kruger
Can I ask a follow up question to that, what do you mean when you say waiting on the Lord? Yeah, that is all over scripture. Wait for the Lord. Wait for the Lord. You know, be strong and take heart. Wait for the Lord. What? What does that mean? Is it passive? Is it active? I’d love to hear more some thoughts on that.

Mark Vroegop
Yeah. So it’s not passive, because waiting, by definition, means that I’m looking to something that I have an expectation. Or also in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, waiting and hope are actually they come from the same word. They mean sort of the same thing. And in our particular context, waiting and hope do not go together at all. So waiting on the Lord essentially means hoping in the Lord. I’m looking to Him, and so I define it in the book as waiting on God is learning to live on what I know to be true about God. So I’m looking to him when I don’t know what’s true about my life. In those gap moments, instead of being frustrated that I’m not in control. I use them as an opportunity to hope in the Lord remind myself who he is. That’s what it means to wait on the Lord.

Courtney Doctor
Oh, that idea of hoping and and where our expectations lie. And I just thought before I ask you the next question, I just thought it might be really helpful for our listeners to even just bring to mind three things that you are currently waiting on, and so be thinking about those things as we have this conversation. But Mark you, you talked about expectations. So how do those expectations affect how we wait? I remember when we were first married, Craig and I realized that our biggest disagreements were on the weekends, because we had these unspoken expectations over what the weekend was going to like look like for each of us, and we didn’t say them to each other, but then we’d be super frustrated when all of a sudden he was, you know, doing a project of remodeling the bathroom, and I’m like, no, no, we were going to, you know, go on a hike. So expectations and defining them and managing them are huge, but how do they impact and affect what we are waiting for and how we wait.

Mark Vroegop
Well, in the book, I talk about a pretty signature moment in my life when a counselor asked me that question. He asked me, Mark, what are your expectations for pastoral ministry in light of some things that I was, you know, walking through, and I was like, I don’t, I don’t have expectations. And he chuckled, my wife chuckled. It was kind of embarrassing, and I know you’re not supposed to laugh at a counselee Like, what’s going on here? And then I realized how silly, even foolish my answer was. He said, Mark, of course, you have expectations. Do you think you can name them? And then when I began to think about, well, how did I expect ministry or life or church was going to work out as I started to name them, I realized, wow, these actually have a stronger hold on my heart than what I thought they did, and I realized that I actually do have expectations. It’s okay to name them, because in naming them, I actually identify that they they have a level of control, sometimes that I know, and in some cases for me, just not even aware the significance of which those expectations shaped my emotions and and what I was even looking forward to, I think at the end of the day, our expectations are connected to our dreams, our desire to control our lives, or how we think our life is going to Go and so misplaced expectations really collide with our vision of what our life is going to be. So control is right in the middle of misplaced expectations.

Courtney Doctor
And then do we place those expectations on God like our expectation is that he will fulfill all of those right that all of a sudden, then that can be so disruptive in that relationship with Him, because we’re expecting him to be the one to for the outcome. We’re expecting him to produce the outcome that we’re hoping for and that we’re, you know, we think we’re waiting for. Melissa, I interrupted you. What did you start to say,

Melissa Kruger
No, I think it’s been living life. Mark, I would have answered very similar to you, like, oh, I don’t know where I expected to live. And then. Lord took me over to Scotland, and I was like, Well, this was not what I expected. Like this was but I didn’t even know I had a plan or that I really wanted to live near family and old friends and have deep roots until I was uprooted. It’s like, sometimes he exposes, oh, you had a lot of expectations, and I’m going to show you what they were. Now I’m gonna maybe help you learn to wait on me. I love this line from your book, waiting requires living by what I know about God when I don’t know what’s true about my life. Help us understand that statement. It’s it’s got a lot in it.

Mark Vroegop
It does, and I think it’s really important. And for me, it’s been the sort of the thing that’s been most transformative, and that is that when I face a gap moment when I don’t know what’s going on, I can fill that gap with things like anger, anxiety, apathy. I can get mad, I can get anxious and worry, or I can just kind of throw up my hands and say, I don’t care, when the reality is that gap moment is actually a divinely designed opportunity for me to be reminded who’s in control of the universe, who’s truly sovereign, who can be trusted, and that all his plans are good in accordance to his overall plan for the world. And for me, so many of us believe in God’s sovereignty, but we actually have to live in it, in gap moments when we don’t know what’s true. The other thing is that I found in my own journey that those gap moments created within me a over fixation on what I didn’t know. So the gap moment would be like, I don’t know this and I don’t know that, and why isn’t this happening? And in that moment, I could actually shift and realize, well, actually, there’s a lot that I do know. I know who God is. I know what he’s like. I know he’s trustworthy. And by actually reorienting what I’m thinking about and focusing on, I can actually transform gap moments into opportunities to welcome God into those spaces, which actually is what his plan is in the first place. And that’s what it means to wait on the Lord.

Courtney Doctor
I love that. And even just even if she’s saying like so so many of us know and believe and even trust that God is sovereign, but so often we don’t trust that he’s good and that his plan is going to be good, and that as he goes about his Romans eight, working all things together for the good of those who believe that that’s actually going to be good for us. And I think it’s in those gap moments mark that as I look back on these times of really brutal waiting, honestly, really hard, hard gap times, I call them lag you know these brutal lag times in our life? It’s, it’s where he has when I’ve done it well, when I haven’t wasted my waiting, it’s the roots have grown deeper that I have become stronger. I have been more rooted and established. I have. I have grown in maturity. I have, I have moved from infancy more into adulthood. You know, those are actually like these beautiful times that were so hard. But on the other side, I know more about who God is and so. So flesh out a little bit more, because I do think this is where the rubber meets the road for all of us. So if we can, you know, we affirm this, waiting requires a love that line. Waiting requires living by what I know about God when I don’t know what’s true about my life. How does what we know about God? How can we grow in that prior to these really hard seasons of waiting, or during these really hard seasons of waiting, like what’s helped you in that?

Mark Vroegop
Well, what I did is developed a list of verses and statements that relate to who God is. So call them God is statements, or Lord you are, and I list them in the appendix. And one of the things that I would do is I would just run through a series of verses or statements that I had committed to memory just to remind my soul. Look, the Lord is a stronghold. I know he’s a stronghold. The Lord is King. The Lord is in His holy temple. The Lord is righteous. The Lord is my chosen portion. The Lord is my rock, my fortress, my deliverer. In fact, Psalm 18 just gives a laundry list, My God, my rock, and whom I take refuge, my shield, the horn of my salvation. The Lord is my shepherd. So I find that when I’m in a gap moment, if I just start throwing all of those Lord is statements at my gap, it’s amazing how suddenly my attention shifts from what I don’t know to what I do know. And quite frankly, I know all of those things. They’re in the back of my head, but I don’t use them in a way that fills the gap moment I’m more focused on what I don’t know about my life than what I do know about the Lord. So for me, it’s a very helpful strategy to shift my focus learn what it means to turn this into worship and then, quite frankly, realize that this is going to be an ongoing, sometimes hourly, sometimes minute by minute, sometimes second by second, commitment. I’m not going to let this gap own me. I’m going to use this as an opportunity for God to do what he wants to do in my life, and I’m going to stop being surprised. At how often I have to wait. Just I need to stop being surprised. Oh, of course, I’m a human. Guess what? I’m not in control of everything. That’s why I don’t like waiting. So I just need to be Oh, great. I’m waiting today. Welcome to humanity.

Courtney Doctor
I mean two little gold mines in that I’m going to stop being surprised by my waiting, and I need to stop, I don’t know how you said it exactly, but stop focusing so much on what I don’t know about my life, and start focusing more on what I do know about God. Melissa, what were you gonna say?

Melissa Kruger
Yeah, no, I have gotten to the point now where I have to say the gap moment is actually the moment for faith. That’s where. And here’s the thing, my faith is not proven to the Lord. He proves my faith to me. He proves what is true about him in that moment, that oh, actually hoping in the Lord, waiting the Lord, this changes my experience today of what I’m going through, the promises of God. It’s not just for Oh, in the future, this will have an answer. It actually changes how I experience it today. So I can be patient and joyful and loving and peaceful and kind and gentle, because he must have a reason, and it must be for my good. It cannot be because the God of all the universe has ordained it to be. So when I hold on to that, I can fight for joy and I can understand statements like rejoice always give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will. Nothing else makes sense. If God isn’t sovereign and God isn’t good, I can’t hold on to those promises. And so everything you’re saying that gap is actually the moment of true belief and and now we’re going to do something with our audience, and we’re going to actually ask you to wait, because we’re going to go to a little bit of a word from our sponsors. So if you’ll be patient with us, wait through that. We’ll be right back. Welcome back. I am really enjoying this conversation about waiting. I One thing, mark you had just said a moment ago, did spark this memory for me, one thing I’ve been doing for about the past three years is saving all of my scraps in a compost bucket right in my kitchen. So I’m saving eggshells, my tea leaves, my banana peels, and then I dump it every well, it should be, it should be every three days, but let’s be honest, it’s sometimes two weeks I dump it in this compost pile in my backyard. Well, my son and I this month that’s been going on for three years, just got all the soil out of that and put it in my garden. And already, all that waste material is fertilizing the soil, and I have the best plants already I’ve had in years because of those waste products. And I think that’s that image I have when you you say, waiting isn’t a waste, that what looks like a waste to us, is actually just fertilizer for this next season. So I want us to turn actually to Scripture and think about some people in Scripture who waited, and maybe, what can we learn from their examples, positively or negatively? What? Yeah, what. And maybe even answer the question, what does biblical waiting look like? I mean, I think we can talk about what it doesn’t look like, but I’d love to just think through some scriptural examples. And Courtney, you can join in too, if you have any of people have waited in Scripture. I think when we really start thinking about it, it’s a pretty common experience in Scripture. So what can we learn from their examples, as they teach us from the Old Testament and from the new

Mark Vroegop
Yeah? So first of all, I just want to go back to your compost analogy, because there’s a lot of people are going to resonate with that, because they’re going to be like, yeah, it’s useful. And guess what? It stinks, right? So, so waiting is useful, even though it’s hard and stinky, and that process, like, has a really good outcome, but it takes time, and it does. You wouldn’t you wouldn’t think if, if someone came over to your house and they saw a bucket of compost, they wouldn’t think, Boy, nice job. Alyssa, great. But actually, you have something really valuable that’s going to do something important, but it takes time, and even the result of it, at least in the short term, doesn’t seem to be very attractive, but it actually is. In fact, that’s one of the reasons, I think that James uses the example of a farmer when he talks about perseverance, and he says very specifically, to see how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient for it. So if you’re a farmer, you plant, and then you have to wait. Waiting isn’t an accident. Waiting is part of what it means to be a farmer. So if you don’t like waiting, you probably shouldn’t be a farmer, because waiting is a part of what it means to be an effective farmer. In. Growing your crops. Well, when you look at the example throughout the Bible, most leaders have pretty important waiting stories. Think of Abraham, think of Joseph, think of Moses. We go to the New Testament. You have the Apostle Paul. We have even the design of the Gospel itself, with the crucifixion and the resurrection, we have a gap moment between Good Friday and Resurrection Day, and God could have designed the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus to be tighter in terms of the timeline. And here are the disciples who are in the upper room. They think their life is over. They hitch their wagon to the wrong leader, and all they what they don’t know is, if they wait just a little longer, the whole narrative is going to flip and they’re going to see the plan. But the waiting is actually part of God’s design. So I argue in the book that waiting is an essential part of every follower of Jesus’s life. And actually, when we look in the Bible, we begin to see it all over the place. David would be another example, which is why I think he wrote so much in his Psalms about what it means to wait on the Lord, because he had to. He did, and he had to turn those wilderness moments into opportunities for worship.

Courtney Doctor
I love that. In some ways, the entire Christian life is a life of waiting. I mean, why? Why is there this lag time between salvation and in glory, we’re left here right for a reason. God’s at work, and he’s at work in us, and he’s at work through us. And so in some ways, it really just defines our entire kind of human existence, or Christian existence, at least, of of waiting

Mark Vroegop
And one of the things that was really helpful for me realizing that is I learned to stop being surprised when I’m waiting, like I have this thought that waiting means something’s wrong or waiting is I don’t want to wait, I don’t like to wait, but God builds waiting into my life for His good pleasure. And so if I can just stop being surprised about the waiting and being upset that I’m waiting, it actually gets you, like, eight tenths of the way there to begin embracing it and stop wasting it.

Melissa Kruger
And that’s a really good point, because here’s the thing, attainment doesn’t solve our waiting problem. It’s just we’re going to keep waiting. So one story I always turn into it as a waiter in Scripture is Rachel. She’s waiting for a baby, waiting and waiting. And her sister is over there, fertile as the day is long, she’s having baby after baby after baby, and she finally gets Joseph. And I don’t know if you remember what the name Joseph means in Hebrew, and it doesn’t mean my soul rejoices in the Lord my waiting is finally over. It actually means, may he add, so she had just gotten this one baby, and she’s already like, why now I need another and, you know, there’s this picture of, yeah, I’m gonna finally, even, even, let’s use the traffic example. Guess what? We’re gonna get through the red light, and then there’s gonna be another one tomorrow. I mean, I’ll be honest on our way to church this Sunday, I said to my husband, I’m just so shocked. You’re still surprised that sometimes the light is red.

Courtney Doctor
That is so funny. Oh, I can’t picture Mike being like that at all. Just kidding.

Melissa Kruger
And I was like, because he sighed with this sigh, and the light was red that I was like, you know, I mean sometimes, but it’s so that’s such a good posture mark, to just realize we’re gonna wait. We’re gonna wait,

Courtney Doctor
And our hope back to the hope and expectation thing, that it’s not actually the thing given or the the thing we’re hoping for, that when it is, when that waiting is over for that thing, that job, that family, that whatever it is, the big things and the little things that we think our soul is going to be satisfied. And that was such a great example of Rachel being like and now I want the next one. It’s just so in some ways, we bring it on. We bring it on ourselves. But I also loved the thought so you said in the beginning, you know, sometimes you just say these things out loud, these truths about God, to bring them to the front of your mind. And you know that that is so true in my life, I remember seasons where I would stand, it was just at a window upstairs, and I would look out. We lived on some acreage, and I would look out, and I would just out loud, say things that I knew were true of God. But I think also it’s important at the at the other end of the waiting to say the things that are true about God, about and to be to be grateful. Because so often, when we get this thing that we’ve been waiting for, then we think, you know, it was just coincidence or or our own ingenuity, or, you know, we forget, like we have been begging the Lord for that thing, and then when in his kindness and grace, He gives us some semblance of that, then I think it’s just as important to to thank him for that. But back to these seasons of waiting. It is so easy. Me. It For Me, I’m going to be autobiographical here. It is so easy to excuse sin in my life when I am in especially a prolonged season of waiting, I bitterness can really, I mean, it can fester that whole idea of being disappointed in something and then this discontentment, and it leads to, you you know disobedience, right, the pattern of disappointment, discontentment, disobedience that we see over and over in Scripture. Well, I think that that can really be heightened in seasons of waiting and and I know I have gone through seasons where I just give myself the freedom to let bitterness take root, or to to let apathy, all the things you kind of mentioned in the beginning, that that it feels kind of justified, and I’ve had to come to grips with the fact that that that shows I’m actually angry at the situation, and I’m not trusting God. And so how can we actively fight? First of all, am I the only one? Secondly, how can we actively fight against sin that takes root more easily during seasons of waiting?

Mark Vroegop
Yeah, you certainly aren’t the only one that’s for sure. Well, in my life, what’s been helpful is to realize that those gaps create tension. And actually the one of the words for weight is the Hebrew word kava, and it is the idea of a cord that’s twisted. And so think of it as twisted or tense. Hope. So it’s uncomfortable hope. So the first thing that’s been helpful is just to realize just because I feel uncomfortable or just because this is tense doesn’t mean something’s wrong or that it’s abnormal. Sometimes, just even that feeling kind of leads me to want to solve it, instead of just being like, Nope, it’s okay, just to sit in it and to realize part of that is expectations, but part of that is just also being comfortable with, well, yep, I feel tense because I’m waiting. No one’s done anything wrong. Nothing is wrong. It’s I’m just waiting. So the second thing is realizing what my tendency is to use to try and fill that gap moment. So the gap identifies that I’m not in control of my life. And I go, I have a I have a playbook when I am not in control. And there’s probably a number of things that we could fill that gap with, but I identify at least three, and there’s three A’s, anger, anxiety and apathy. And I think it’s helpful to identify of those three, which do we go to, first, second and third? So for me, it would be anger. I want to fix it. Anxiety. I’m going to overthink about it, and if that doesn’t work, I’m just going to give up. I’m not really giving up. It’s just self protective, but just realizing, Oh, I feel angry. And really I’m angry because I want control, because I don’t like this tension that is helpful to identify, I think, the cause, the source, so that then I can embrace like what David says in Psalm 27 let your heart take courage. All you who wait on the Lord. The idea is, borrow courage from the Lord. I have this idea of a library, and I get to go into God’s grand library. I get to check the book of courage out and take it with me. I get to take his courage with me so that I can stay in that space, trust Him in the gap, and then realize at the end of the day, what this is about is I actually want to control my life. I want to be God. I want to know what’s going on in micro and macro ways, and waiting challenges that, and I found it helpful just to embrace that and then turn to God so that I’m not just relentlessly trying to get control in any way possible.

Courtney Doctor
I’ve never thought about that idea of waiting being part of what God uses to challenge our own grasps at sovereignty and autonomy and all that, you know, control all the things that we want. But absolutely, I did that with my children, right? I would say you have to wait. Like I know what’s better here, and I need you to wait. And it was meant to cultivate things in them that, yeah, I’ve never thought about that before, in in what the Lord is doing in my heart and mind, of reminding me you’re the child, I’m the father, you’re the servant, I’m the king, like this is going to be our relationship, and I love you, but, but I am the sovereign one, and it’s a good thing that I’m the sovereign one. So I really, I love that.

Mark Vroegop
Yeah, most of us don’t want to be in that storyline. We don’t like we want to be the main character. We want to be the sovereign one. We we want to be in control. And we just don’t realize, no, we’re actually the children in the parent relationship story. We’re the or the child in that relationship. So it’s a very uncomfortable and important reminder that, oh, newsflash, you’re actually not in control of the universe, therefore you have to wait, which is why I think God built it into our humanity. Imagine what we would be like if we got everything we wanted in the timeline in which we wanted it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, imagine if you raise kids that way.

Mark Vroegop
Oh, wow. And yet,

Courtney Doctor
There is advice in there,

Mark Vroegop
There is right and yet, isn’t our culture incentivizing monetizing that? I mean, is anybody? I mean, it’s awesome that I can order something online and have it here in six hours. But that’s also changing my expectations. I expect fast answers

Melissa Kruger
And maturity is really the ability to understand I don’t. I wouldn’t even pick the right life if I could correct so, so, I mean, you know, the older I get, the more I’m like, Oh, thank You that I can’t Amazon my life, really, because that would be terrible. I mean, it would just be terrible. I have, I have seen that. I just want to encourage you both with the alliteration in that last section, I’m going to repeat it. We had disappointment leads to discontent and disobedience. And then how does that disobedience take shape with anger, anxiety and apathy? I mean, there’s some outline for a talk right there. So I’m very impressed with you both on that. Okay, Mark, your first book was on lament. And I think the reality about waiting, it is a form of suffering, I mean, in a lot of ways, and often there’s suffering involved in the waiting. And sometimes we’re waiting for we’re waiting in a painful season for relief. And so what, how would you describe the relationship between lament and waiting, you know? And What? What? What role does lament play in our waiting on the Lord?

Mark Vroegop
Yeah, sure. So I kind of discovered the waiting track through my study in lament, and it came out in Lamentations. Three you know that text that we know so well? It’s the pinnacle of the book of Lamentations, the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They’re new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I hope in Him amazing. And then it says this, The Lord is good to those who wait for him. And so there’s, there’s something there about lament and waiting that do definitely go together. I’d put it this way, lament is the language that you use when your gap has been created by grief. So a loss, a sadness. How do you talk to God when you are just grieving because of the consequences of living in a broken world, waiting is what you do to gaps. So lament to grief, waiting to gaps. Now, gaps are part of a broken world. I don’t suspect, and don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, but I think the glory of the new heaven and the new earth will be a perpetual experience of no delays in anything, and it’s okay and right and beautiful. And we won’t be in control, but we’ll have everything that we could possibly want. And it’s more and more and more. You know, Lewis talked about further up and further in. We’re just going to keep going further. It’s going to be amazing, blowing our minds. But right now, we live in a gap world where things don’t fit together, and waiting is hard and difficult because it reminds us that not everything fits really well, and so that’s how those two things are connected. Grief often involves some element of waiting, but lament is the language that you apply to sorrow, where I think waiting, a biblical view of waiting on the Lord, is what you do when you’re in a gap world.

Courtney Doctor
That’s beautiful. Well, Mark, we know that a lot of people listening are going through just a wide variety of types of waiting, and it’s it’s hard, and so as a pastor, as a brother in Christ, would you just speak to the women directly and offer some encouragement to those who are just in a brutal season of of waiting?

Mark Vroegop
Yeah, I get it. It’s really hard and painful, and it’s never easy, and it can also be monumentally just discouraging, especially if you’re waiting for a long time, or if you’re waiting for your entire life, that’s not an easy thing to do. So in no way am I saying that waiting is easy, or if you do these things, it’ll be a piece of cake. It’s still hard and challenging. One of the things I talk about in the book, though, is mapping God’s faithfulness. When we look in the Bible, we can see the story of Abraham and Moses, and we have a 30,000 foot view of their lives. We’re not into the day to day. Those were long seasons of difficulty that they lived, and we get to see the beautiful outworking of God’s grace in their life over their entire lives. And I’m telling you that story isn’t just written in their life. It’s written in every Christian’s life, and it’s just a matter of time. God, until God’s full picture is going to be clear and evident, and we can trust him in these gap moments, because he’s always proved himself to be faithful. And if you look back on your life, you can see that’s actually true. You can see the ways that you were in chapter one, and now you’re in chapter 10, and you see how they all fit together. And eventually God’s going to make it all plain. It may not be until the new heavens and new earth, but eventually it’s going to be plain. And as a result, right now, we can trust Him every day to keep waiting and trusting and living on what we know about him when we don’t know what’s going on in our lives.

Melissa Kruger
That’s I picture these like fireside chats that we’re going to have in heaven. Maybe I don’t know this is just conjecture, obviously, where we sit and do that, and that’s part of worship that we sit and look back and say, Oh, wow, that’s what he was doing. And yeah, I think they’ll just be this collective rejoicing of his goodness was always guiding his sovereignty, and if that is just going to be this collective rejoicing that we get to do when we’re there, but today we’re in the dark, and so we have glimpses of light, but it’s that picture, that hopeful picture, I think, that does even shine a Light back today to help us to wait Well, Mark, we want to thank you so much for being a guest on the deep dish, and especially for this conversation. It’s so helpful. We always wrap up with a final question for our guests. And today we have a big, kind of a big one for you. Normally they’re kind of fun. This one’s kind of like, Hmm,

Courtney Doctor
I might throw one in about puppies or something? Yeah,

Melissa Kruger
we haven’t talked about puppies yet. I know, I know, but we do want to ask this, because you know you’re president of TGC, what excites you most about the future of the gospel coalition?

Mark Vroegop
Well, I’ve been a pastor for 30 years, and TGC has been enormously helpful to my life and ministry in so many ways that I’m just grateful that I get to be part of a team and a movement to figure out, how do we help renew and unify the contemporary church of the ancient gospel? How do we take something that’s timeless and important and life changing and then use the gifts platform that God has given us to be able to help local church pastors and churches and ministry leaders and women’s Bible study leaders every seven days, on Sunday and throughout the week, be able to be faithful to the calling of God on their lives and to spread the Good News of Jesus that changes the world. So it’s a privilege to just be able to help that resource entity, to be able to continue to fulfill its mission.

Courtney Doctor
And here, I thought you were gonna say the deep dish was what you were most excited about, about the future of council coalition, okay, in three sentences, tell us why we were joking about puppies, because that is actually a big part of your life.

Mark Vroegop
Yeah, it is. My wife has found her thing with we have a bernedoodle in our house, and she loves a little business that she runs of breeding bernedoodle puppies. So we have, once a year or so, beautiful puppy therapy in our home. So it’s a great delight.

Courtney Doctor
So well, as somebody else who has a bernedoodle in her home, I got to see these puppies, 12 of them, and they are absolutely gorgeous. Well, again, Mark, thanks for joining us and friends. We hope that you have enjoyed this episode of the deep dish from the gospel coalition, and may we all wait on the Lord really well see you next time you.