These words are part of a collection of writings from the final months of our ten-year-long journey of delayed fertility. In them, I’m pulling back the privacy-curtain and taking you inside the pages of my prayer journals to give insight to those who have not experienced infertility, and hope to those who are neck-deep in the lonely-midst of it.

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I had wrestled. I had looked up half a dozen verses on waiting. I had worshipped. And then, I came to stand on my watchtower alongside a waiting prophet. I ended that April morning with Habakkuk’s words, as well as the words of my favorite, tried and true commentators.

(9:40am) Saturday – 4/18/15, part three

I will stand my watch and set myself on the rampart, and watch to see what He will say to me … then the LORD answered … write the vision and make it plain … the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end, it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.
(Habakkuk 2:1-3, parts)

I started my quiet time that morning, presenting the questions that began to form a reasonable doubt in my mind of whether or not we were to continue to wait. And God reinforced my weakened faith. Just like me, Habakkuk was waiting earnestly for an answer to his complaints that had been laid out in the previous chapter. And as he waited, he received a revelation which was to be fulfilled. Not immediately, yet in due time. And in the meantime? All he could do was wait. And watch.

According to Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown, that phrase that says “watch to see what He will say to me”? It literally means in me. As it turns out, God is not speaking to the prophet’s outer ear, but inwardly. “When we have prayed to God, we must observe what answers God gives by His word, His Spirit, and His providences.”

Write the vision. Write it all down – every single too-good-to-be-true word that is a little bit too hard to believe. And then watch to see how God will confirm it all. How He will connect it all. Write it down. Because that promise might not be for right now. But it is for an appointed time (just like Sarah’s Genesis 18 promise). And even though the time that is appointed by God is still off in the future?

it should be enough for your faith that God has even spoken it

I bolded over the commentary words and then underlined them for good measure.

And then, I ended that morning with a little bit of Matthew Henry, turning his Habakkuk-words into my final morning prayer.

While I wait, “I will look up, will look around, will look within, and watch to see what He will say to me. I will listen attentively to the words of His mouth and carefully observe the steps of His providence, that I may not lose the least hint of instruction or direction.” Again, it is pointed out: “I will watch to see what he will say in me. Even in an ordinary way, God not only speaks to us by His Word but speaks in us by our consciences, whispering to us, ‘this is the way, walk in it,’ and we must attend to the voice of God in both.”

“He, standing upon his watch, intimates his patience,
his constancy and resolution;
he will wait the time and weather the point, as a watchman does,
but he will have an answer;
he will know what God will say to him.

It is the prophet’s job to write the vision.
It is the people’s job to wait for the accomplishment of it.

“It is a great encouragement to wait with patience, that, though the promised favor be deferred long, it will come at last, and be an abundant recompense to us for our waiting. … And it will fully answer our believing expectations.”

So this whole “we believe God will perform our miracle for us” conviction-thing I have been saying loudly and boldly on the world stage for nine years and counting? At the end of it all? I will stand tall and stand proud in the light of our miracle. And I will not be ashamed.