If your heart is weary and longing for answers—for healing, for provision, for miracles—Waiting for God renews your hope with strong biblical truth and encouraging Scripture-based prayer. Guided to inhale God’s Word, exhale in prayer, and rest in God’s love, you will be restored, able to worship the Lord even when the wait feels endless. Xochitl Dixon shares her personal stories and the … experiences of others to help you reclaim your peace and joy, knowing God has not forgotten you.
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Waiting for God
A collection of people living with pain, living with cancer and other diseases. The author lives chronic pain everyday but has found a way to still help others. She is a Prayer warrior. A lot of encouraging stories in this nonfiction book. Real life stories.
At the end of each story there is a bible verse and reflection and questions. One of my favorite in the book is “who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Luke 12:25”. Worrying is something that we all struggle with.
I received a complimentary copy of the book from the publisher through Celebrate Lit. This book review is my own opinion.
I don’t know about you, but I am the most impatient person around. I don’t like to wait in lines, wait for a food order to be delivered to my table or even sit in traffic. It is hard for me to understand why God isn’t answering my prayers sometimes and it frustrates me. When I received this book to review, I laughed because I knew I needed this book to stop my pity party and listen to God.
As I began to read the book, it gave me a wake up call. How many of you have ever felt like God wasn’t working fast enough on your behalf? I can easily raise my hand and confess I am guilty of that. It is easy for us to point fingers at others and tell God they need to change ; that it wasn’t my fault we stopped talking to our friend or family member. After all, we don’t have a problem. I loved how the author shared how she finally realized that God does hear our prayers and He is answering them in His timing not ours.
The author uses examples from the Bible to illustrate how God shows people like Hannah that He is waiting for her to surrender her whole heart to Him. It is so easy to become selfish and whine about our problems. Hannah in the Bible wanted a child but needed to give her love to God. He answered her prayer, but it was with change within Hannah that made it come to pass. The book also includes personal stories that were inspiring and showed how God worked in their lives. The author includes prayer and questions at the end of each chapter which I enjoyed.
At the beginning of each chapter is a reading assignment, which I decided to do. The reading was encouraging and very relatable to the chapter. The author has done a great job of giving readers a book that guides you through challenges in your life while refreshing your mind and soul with God. I learned a valuable lesson while reading this book. I had become a full time caregiver in January for my brother who had Stage IV colon cancer. Day after day, I cared for him and made sure he knew that he was loved and important. Some days were hard as a I saw him start to slip away. I prayed for strength each day to be there for my brother. There were days I didn’t know if I could go on, but I was determined to make my brother comfortable in his last days. I wondered where God was and why wasn’t He healing my brother. Through this book I found peace and knew that God had been beside me each day as I cared for my brother. He gave me the courage to lead my brother to Jesus before he passed away. The book showed me that I had found a new relationship with Jesus as He gave me strength to care for my brother,
I encourage everyone to read this book. It is filled with scriptures, stories and wisdom that will renew your relationship with God and soften your heart to those who have caused you pain.
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Matthew 11:29-30
I received a copy of this book from Celebrate Lit. The review is my own opinion.
“Hurry up and wait!” With unknown origins but generally attributed to the American military, this phrase encapsulates contemporary culture. Always bustling, stampeding through life at a pace often well above the safe speed limit and bemoaning any red lights we encounter along the way. We want what we want, when we want it. Manifest destiny, right? The American Dream. Have it all, do it all, be it all—on our own timeline, of course. We are not usually patient people; I know I’m not. I try, but far too frequently I fall short and haste reigns. It’s the waiting that trips us up. It’s also the waiting that offers us peace and fortitude.
When I began reading Xochitl Dixon’s “Waiting for God: Trusting Daily in God’s Plan and Pace”, I knew that the timing was God-ordained. I just didn’t realize how much so. It dovetailed nicely with my previous read, “Obedience Over Hustle” by Malinda Fuller. Trust is something I’m really focusing on in my faith walk this year. Some days are better than others. This week has fallen into the “others” category. Sometimes the thing we wait for takes us by surprise and turns us upside down, even when we were expecting it. The day after I began “Waiting for God”, one of my very dearest friends and sisters in Christ went home to be with Jesus. We bonded over shared chronic illnesses, and in the short four-and-a-half years that we knew each other, we prayed expectantly for healing. The Lord worked in miraculous ways in her life, bringing her back from the valley of the shadow on multiple occasions. This last crisis was different, though, and in my heart I knew that the time had come for her to meet Jesus face-to-face.
As I slowly read through “Waiting for God”, my mind hazy with a mixture of grief and joy, the devotionals ministered to my heart. I have had my own seemingly long period of waiting, now over seven years into chronic illness life with a body that fails more each year, and waiting is not on my list of favorite pastimes. You know that a book is written through the power of the Holy Spirit when each Scripture cited speaks to you personally and you find yourself continuously highlighting quotations from the book itself. One of my favorites early on was: “When we focus on living for God, like Joseph, we can accept everything that occurs during the wait as an opportunity to grow closer to Him and others.” That’s what it’s all about! Learning to rely upon God completely, and to look beyond the superficial shell of our trials to see the pearls growing within.
Living with multiple chronic illnesses, some days it can be so difficult to see life from the lens of eternity, the way that God does. Our suffering seems to go on forever, and eternal life with the Lord seems so far away. We know that one day all of our suffering will end, yet that one day can seem terribly long in coming. This quotation from the book offers a new insight: “Living by faith one day at a time is of greater value than recounting the number of days we’ve been hurting or trying to figure out how much longer we’ll have to endure our trials.” Indeed, “He promises peace, even when we don’t experience relief from our suffering on this side of eternity.” Our part is to accept it! In order to do so, we must surrender to Him, which is a recurrent theme in “Waiting for God.”
With a devotional format, “Waiting for God” can be read straight through or on a daily basis. Each chapter opens with “Today’s Truth” and a Bible reading, which in the Kindle version is a hyperlink that conveniently takes you to the Scripture online. Each chapter ends with an Inhale, which is a relevant verse from Scripture, and an Exhale in the form of a prayer. There are also 3-4 discussion questions that are relative to what is currently going on in your life and can therefore be re-explored with each read-through. This is a book to be savored, and one that I would recommend for anyone at any point in their life’s journey. Personal stories drive home the point that we all need to be growing in our relationship with the Lord, regardless of what our waiting looks like and whether we are experiencing a mountaintop zenith or a valley nadir.
I received a complimentary copy of this book through CelebrateLit and was not required to post a favorable review. All opinions are my own