Still Standing

There is a question that does not get asked out loud very often, but almost everyone who has walked with God long enough has felt it quietly forming somewhere in the back of their mind: How long can you believe something before you start wondering if you were wrong to believe it?

A month? A year? Five years?

For most of us, the honest answer is that we do not know exactly when it happens. We just notice one day that a prayer we used to bring to God with tears and urgency has gone quiet. We still believe in God. We just stopped getting our hopes up about that particular thing. We learned, somewhere along the way, to protect ourselves from the ache of expectation.

If that resonates with you, then the story of Abraham in Genesis 17 was written for people like us.

Twenty-Four Years Is a Long Time
When God first called Abraham, he was 75 years old. By the time we reach Genesis 17, he is 99. That is 24 years of carrying a promise that had not yet arrived. God had told him he would be the father of a great nation, that he would have a son through his wife Sarah. And yet, decade after decade, nothing.

We tend to read stories like Abraham's with a certain ease because we already know how it ends. We know Isaac is coming. Abraham did not know that. He was living in real time, in the middle of a story whose ending he could not see, growing older every single year while the promise seemed to grow more impossible.

Twenty-four years is long enough to forget a password for an account you do not remember creating. It is long enough for jobs, houses, relationships, and entire seasons of life to come and go. And it is long enough for a once-fervent prayer to quietly become something you barely bring up anymore.

When God Shows Up Again
What is striking about Genesis 17 is how God opens the conversation when he finally appears to Abraham. He does not offer an explanation for the delay. He does not apologize for the wait or provide a timeline of everything he has been doing in the meantime. He simply says, "I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless."

That is it. Before anything else, God anchors the entire conversation in who he is. Not what he is about to do, not a revised plan or an updated promise. Just a reminder of his identity. I am God Almighty. That is where faith has to return when time has worn down our expectations. Not just remembering what God is capable of doing, but remembering who he is.

Then God does something that could seem almost unkind on the surface. He changes Abram's name to Abraham, which means "father of many." The man is 99 years old with no children, and now every introduction, every conversation, every time someone calls his name, he will be reminded of the very thing that has not happened yet. God is calling Abraham according to where the promise is going, not according to what Abraham can see.

The Faith That Still Has Questions
When God tells Abraham that Sarah, at 90 years old, will bear him a son, Abraham falls on his face. It sounds like worship until you keep reading. He falls on his face and laughs. He asks, in so many words, whether God is serious. Does God understand how old they are? Does he understand the circumstances?

Abraham is not suddenly an atheist in this moment. He knows God. He has followed him, seen him move, and built a life of trust in him. But 24 years of waiting has made the promise feel increasingly absurd, and his honest reaction is laughter.

What is remarkable is what God does not do in response. He does not revoke the promise. He does not lecture Abraham about his lack of faith. He does not walk away. He stays, and he reaffirms exactly what he said. Sarah will bear a son. The plan has not changed.
This tells us something important about the kind of faith God honors. We have a tendency to think that real faith never doubts, never questions, never laughs at the impossible. But here is one of the greatest figures of faith in all of Scripture, lying on the ground laughing at God, and God does not leave him. Maybe questions are not the enemy of faith. Maybe they are what faith looks like when it is holding on to God with everything it has while being brutally honest about the circumstances.

Walking While You Wait
Abraham then suggests an alternative. He already has a son named Ishmael. What if God just used him? What if the promise could be fulfilled through what already exists, through something Abraham can see and touch and know?

God blesses Ishmael. But he does not change the plan. He says, in essence, I know what you have. I know what you can see. And I still meant what I said.

Then God tells Abraham something that reframes the entire conversation about waiting. He tells him to walk. Not to sit still. Not to put everything on hold until the promise arrives. To walk.

Waiting on God has never meant putting your life on hold. There is a dangerous tendency to let one unanswered prayer become the waiting room for everything else. When this changes, we tell ourselves, then I will give more, pray more, live more fully. But that unanswered thing does not get to hold the rest of life hostage.

Abraham's 24 years were not wasted years. He traveled. He built altars. He fought battles. He grew in his knowledge of God. He became someone during the waiting. God was doing something in him on the way to the fulfillment of the promise.

Still Standing
Perhaps the most honest and most hopeful thing that can be said about faith is this: sometimes it does not look like a dramatic leap. Sometimes it looks like waking up after 24 years and realizing you are still here, and God is still here, and that is enough to keep walking.

The invitation is not to believe harder so you can get what you want. It is to keep walking with God because of who he is, even when you cannot see how the story ends. Still trusting. Still asking questions. Still standing.

That is what faith looks like in the middle.