Maybe you started God Encounters and Franklyn’s story stirred something real in you. You believe God is personal. You believe He pursues people. But your own moment hasn’t arrived yet, and waiting to meet God when everyone else’s story already happened can feel discouraging.
Here’s what’s true: Longing for an encounter is not evidence that one isn’t coming. Before we look at what to do in the gap, it helps to understand what the gap actually is.
If you’d rather begin Your Summer With God, Step One, now and come back to this afterward, you can start right here: Start with God Encounters, FREE mini course. For everyone else, here is what to do while you wait.
When Waiting to Meet God Feels Like Standing Still
Waiting to meet God rarely feels productive. Nothing visible seems to be happening. You show up, you pray, you listen, and the encounter you’re hoping for still hasn’t arrived. Consequently, it’s easy to conclude that something about you is the obstacle.
However, that conclusion isn’t supported by how God actually moves throughout Scripture. In our post on Why an Encounter With God Changes Everything, we explored how Paul’s encounter on the road to Damascus arrived without warning, while he was actively working against everything Jesus represented. Readiness wasn’t the precondition. Therefore, the present waiting says nothing reliable about your worthiness or your nearness to Him.
What standing still in the wait can actually be — instead of failure — is positioning. The disciplines you’re maintaining right now, the attention you’re giving Him even without an encounter to validate it yet, are not wasted motion. Rather, they are precisely the posture Scripture describes as seeking.
Think of how a seed behaves before it breaks the surface. From above, the ground looks unchanged for days, sometimes weeks. However, underneath, the seed is doing exactly what it needs to do, on a timeline you cannot see and cannot rush. Standing still on the surface and doing nothing at all are two entirely different conditions, even though they can look identical from where you’re standing.
Why Longing Is Not the Same as Being Far From God
Psalm 27:8 puts words to exactly what you might be feeling: “My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’ Your face, LORD, do I seek.” Notice the order. The longing comes first. The seeking is the response to a desire God Himself placed there.
Therefore, the very fact that you’re waiting to meet God, that you want this badly enough to keep showing up, is itself evidence that He has already done something in you. Longing isn’t distance — it’s usually closeness that hasn’t yet been confirmed by experience.
This matters because many people interpret unmet longing as proof that God is withholding. However, heaven’s openness has never been contingent on you “feeling” an experience of it. The wait does not mean heaven has gone quiet on you specifically. It means the timing of your encounter and the intensity of your longing haven’t lined up yet, and that gap is not unusual.
Still waiting to meet God for yourself, even after starting the journey? You’re not alone, and you haven’t done anything wrong. Start our free 8-minute course, Breakthrough to Hearing God’s Voice, and discover what it looks like to begin recognizing Him for yourself. It’s free. It’s short. And it might be exactly the next step while you wait.
What Waiting to Meet God Looked Like for People in Scripture
You’re not the first person to sit in this gap. In Mark 9:24, a desperate father told Jesus plainly, “… I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” He hadn’t fully arrived at certainty, and Jesus didn’t turn him away for admitting it. His honest uncertainty was met, not rejected.
Thomas offers a similar picture. While the other disciples had already encountered the risen Jesus, Thomas was still waiting to meet God for himself, refusing to take their word for it, according to John 20:24-25. A full week passed before Jesus appeared to him directly. Notice — Jesus didn’t rebuke Thomas’s waiting. He simply showed up when the moment came, scars and all, and let Thomas reach his own conclusion.
There’s something worth sitting with in that detail. Thomas wasn’t excluded from the room. He was present, hearing the testimony of people he trusted, and it still wasn’t enough to close the gap for him personally. That’s not a flaw unique to Thomas. It’s simply what it looks like to need your own encounter even when you’re surrounded by people who’ve already had theirs.
Jeremiah 29:13 promises: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” That promise wasn’t given to people already certain. It was given to people in exile, far from how they imagined their relationship with God should look. The wait, in other words, has biblical precedent — and biblical precedent for resolution, not abandonment.
Three Things to Do While You’re Waiting to Meet God
Knowing the wait has precedent doesn’t make it easier to sit in. Here are three things worth doing in the meantime.
Keep showing up to the same posture, not a more dramatic one. The temptation while waiting is to escalate, to try a more intense fast, a longer prayer time, a different church. However, the father in Mark 9 didn’t escalate his effort; he simply told Jesus the truth about where he was. Consistency, not intensity, is usually the more honest posture.
Let go of comparing your timeline to someone else’s testimony. Franklyn’s story in God Encounters happened on his own timeline, at sixteen, in circumstances he definitely didn’t choose or anticipate. Comparing your own pace against someone else’s specific moment will only obscure what’s actually happening in yours.
Stay in the practices that keep you positioned and attentive, so that when the encounter does arrive, you recognize it rather than miss it because you’d stopped paying attention. In our post on What to Do When Breakthrough Feels Distant, we explored a similar dynamic, the silence between breakthroughs is formation — not failure. The same is true of this earlier season. The practices that sustain momentum after a high are the same practices that position you before one.
What If You’ve Already Started, but Haven’t Felt It Yet?
Maybe you’ve already begun God Encounters, or you finished it and felt nothing shift. That doesn’t mean the course failed, and it doesn’t mean you failed it. In our post on How to Sustain Momentum After a Spiritual High, we noted that the plateau is real even after genuine breakthrough — formation is often happening in a way you can’t sense yet.
It’s worth saying plainly: an eight-minute story, however honest, is not designed to manufacture an encounter on a schedule. Franklyn’s testimony is an invitation into a relationship, not a mechanism that guarantees a “feeling” by the time the video ends. If you watched it and felt moved, that’s real. If you watched it and felt nothing in particular, that doesn’t disqualify you either. Both responses are simply where you started from.
Those exploring the gift of prophecy or spiritual impartation often describe long seasons of waiting to meet God in any tangible way before something shifted. What they share isn’t a formula that guarantees timing. Rather, it’s the testimony that the wait eventually gave way to something unmistakably personal. Similarly, prophetic intercession reminds us that partnering with God flows out of having been met by Him, but that meeting doesn’t always arrive on the timeline we’d choose.
If you’ve started the course and the wait continues, that’s not a signal to abandon it. It’s simply where the story is right now.
The Waiting Is Not Wasted
Here’s what’s true about waiting to meet God: the gap between longing and encounter is not empty space. It’s the very posture Scripture calls seeking, and seeking has never gone unanswered in Scripture’s own record of it.
Your encounter doesn’t have to look like Franklyn’s, or Paul’s, or the father in Mark 9, or Thomas’s. It only has to be yours. Whether it arrives suddenly or so quietly you almost miss it, the waiting you’re doing right now is not disqualifying you from anything. Rather, it’s the seeking Jeremiah 29:13 promises will be met.
That promise doesn’t come with a defined delivery date. It comes with a guarantee of outcome. Therefore, the honest posture isn’t pretending you’re not waiting, and it isn’t manufacturing urgency you don’t feel. It’s simply continuing to show up, with your heart’s actual longing intact, while the timing plays out on its own terms.
Wherever you are in that wait, Step One is still right here, ready whenever you want to begin or revisit it.
Ready to keep going, wherever you are in the wait? We’ve put together Your Summer with God, three free on-demand mini-courses designed to keep you moving with God through the summer months — no schedule, no pressure.
Step 1 — God Encounters: Hear Franklyn’s story, and let it meet you in the wait.
Step 2 — Breakthrough tp Hearing God’s Voice: Learn to hear God’s voice for yourself.
Step 3 — Maximize Your Gratitude: Build the daily foundation that sustains it all.
