“What do you want to do?” my counselor asked me. “Let’s talk about the future and what it may hold for you.”

I really had no specific answer. After all, I had been trying to just stay afloat for so long, so I answered the best I knew how to: “I want to do God’s will.”

“Good, but I want you to dig deeper,” she replied. “God puts longings deep in our hearts. Look into your heart. Is He saying anything to you?”

At that time, I was recovering from severe postpartum anxiety and depression. I had five-month-old and twenty-month-old boys at home. My mom had been helping me by caring for the boys for days on end, often including nights, until the younger was about three months old, while I tried, unsuccessfully, to rest and sleep. Meanwhile, I had been required to return to work, well before I felt ready, and was trying to balance that, being a mom, and continuing to recover.

And now, I was supposed to dig deep and ask God what He wanted me to do?

I did as my counselor asked. I turned to God and listened. As I did, there arose a stirring within my heart, a joy that I had not felt in a long time.

Without thinking, I blurted out, “I want to write a book for God!” As I did so, a smile crept onto my face, and a deep peace engulfed me.

While I had enjoyed writing in the past and often found solace in it, writing an actual book had seemed unlikely. Though it had been a quiet, mostly unspoken desire of mine, it had seemed like a pipe dream. Yet there was the answer. Suddenly writing felt more right than ever before.

My counselor smiled. “I believe you will!” she said. “I see it in your eyes and on your face. You’re beaming. That’s God.”

Seventeen years have passed since then. The desire to write has remained; yet, for most of those many years, God has said to me, “Wait, not yet.”

“Wait, not yet” was His unending chorus while my verses swayed between patient waiting and impatient striving and falling. There were times in which I had great peace with the waiting and times when it felt heart-crushing.

We have all had the experience of desiring something deeply but needing to wait for it, the experience of not knowing when, how, or even if it would happen. For some of us, especially those reading this blog, it may have been writing or speaking for which we needed to wait. For others, it could have been any number of things. Perhaps waiting was necessary because our children were young, or because work obligations did not leave room for that which we wanted to do. Perhaps health issues kept our desires at bay. Or perhaps it simply wasn’t the time.

Whatever the reason, waiting is difficult. I certainly had a difficult time holding this desire in my heart while, most of the time, doing everything but writing. It was such a strong desire that sometimes I wrote anyway. And I believe that, though it truly was not the right time, He blessed those efforts as well and brought forth fruit from them.

I started a mom blog, Falling on His Grace, in 2009, nearly two years after the conversation in my counselor’s office. Within the first two years after the blog’s creation, I had written more than one hundred fifty posts. Later, there were years I wrote nothing as I realized, more and more, the call to wait on the Lord. Even so, the little writing I did during those years highlighted the slow transformation of my understanding of His call as well as my own slow growth and transformation in Him. Falling on His Grace moved to Instagram in 2021, where I wrote briefly before discerning I was still being asked to wait.

In early 2023, sixteen years in, God gave me what I call the “yellow light” - permission to begin slowly. I felt called to find a community and surround myself with other Catholic writers, and so I joined the team at Catholicmom.com, as well as the Catholic Writers Guild and the PraiseWriters community.

When I wasn’t sharing my writing, I was taking notes and filling notebooks and journals. Through it all, the desire to write and share my faith has remained firmly in my heart and on my mind.

And, through it all, God has been faithful. He has been faithful both in the waiting and in bringing the desire He has placed on my heart to fruition.

King David, in Psalm 37:4, said, “Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

I have heard it said that “give” in this psalm means to conceive. God conceives - creates and forms - desires within our hearts. He takes great pleasure in creating and forming, as He did when He created the world and when He created you and me. And He took great pleasure when He conceived of your purpose, your gifts and talents, your personal vocation. He also takes great pleasure in forming you for it and leading you to it.

God not only creates and forms. He re-creates and transforms. Waiting is an opportunity, a space, for God to re-create and transform us and the desires He has planted within us. To re-form us so that we can step into the purpose and vocation He has planned for us and, purified, give Him glory.

The pleasure and delight God takes in us and in the unique design and unique calling He has given us stem from His great, personal, creative love for each of us. He has a personal, vested interest in each of us, having placed a piece of Himself in us, His handiwork. Having created each of us to share, in a unique way, in His own work.

Returning to our psalm, we read again, “Take delight in the Lord…” It is not only God’s delight in us but also our delight in Him that precedes our fully receiving from Him the fulfillment of the desires He has placed on our hearts. We are invited to take delight in Him, not in His gifts and not in our striving alone to make our desires happen, but in Who He is and in our love for Him.

This message is similar to that from Matthew 6:33: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be given you besides.” What are we seeking? Where are we aimed? From where does our pleasure come? If not from God and His Kingdom, our desires and the “all” of our readings would fall flat. Again, here we must be re-created and transformed, both our love and our desires purified so that they are aimed trustingly at Him. So that, even if God would never fulfill these desires, we would still take delight in Him.

Quite often, God uses a period of waiting to begin this process within us. I can attest to that because He did in me.

Now a new season is beginning in my life. After almost seventeen years of waiting, words are pouring out. God is not only saying “Go! Write! Now is the time!” but is also moving within me in a way He has never done. He is beginning to bring to fulfillment the desire that He placed on my heart in my counselor’s office, and what He did in the waiting helped to prepare me for this time.

Waiting is difficult and often feels purposeless, but, if we are turned toward God, the time is not wasted. God is taking His creation – us and the unique gifts He has given us – and re-creating and transforming us and them. He is delighting in us and in pouring Himself out on us throughout that time.
 

>>>

Kimberly Andrich is a wife and mother of five, to two big boys and three little ladies. Her professional background is in physical therapy, but her passion is writing, especially about the Catholic faith. Kimberly writes from the perspective of having a hidden, chronic illness and experiencing a deep, continuous conversion through being yoked to Jesus in the day-to-day trials and joys of life.You can find more of her work on her blog, fallingonhisgrace.stubstack.com, and in her monthly articles at catholicmom.com.