Delay! The Spiritual Blessing of the Wait
CHRIS WENDEN, DIRECTOR OF PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
“For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: through it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.” – (Habakkuk 2:3, KJV)
If we’re honest, none of us like the word delay. Delays frustrate us. A delayed package, a delay at the drive-thru (my personal breaking point), or having to wait one more week for the next episode of your favorite show.
Delays and waiting frustrate me too. I’m still learning that God’s timing is always perfect, and nothing has shown me that more clearly than the delays in the Vanuatu Water Project.
It’s no secret: ten years in, still no water flowing in Vanuatu. But with the delay came blessings we never could have seen with our own eyes at the start.
The original plan centered on a single spring, feeding all 30 communities through 16 miles of high-pressure pipe. It looked good on paper… until Vanuatu’s shifting, seismic ground did what it does, and that very spring split and re-emerged elsewhere. If we’d broken ground on the original design sooner, we would have built something beautiful yet vulnerable. The years of setbacks forced a full redesign before seriously investing and committing to the wrong approach.
What emerged instead is better in every way. Instead of one complicated (but fragile) system, we’re taking the approach of drilling multiple wells, each serving a localized community. This approach is sturdier, cheaper, and simple enough for each community to maintain on their own systems. When I visited with our Field Leader (Levi Pitman), he pointed out something I hadn’t considered: the old single-source design carried a real relational risk. Tensions between communities could manifest in disruption to the shared water source, potentially even weaponizing it to be used against each other. Drilled wells in separate communities remove that risk entirely. The delay has produced a wiser, more culturally sensitive design in every sense.
The Blessing of the Wait
But while we’ve been tracking the engineering and the setbacks from our North American mindset, Pastor Gabby, leader of the Vanuatu Big Bay Bible School and our lead partner on the ground, has been tracking something else: the spiritual blessing of the wait.
“If we had received it immediately,” Pastor Gabby said, “we would not have learned about God, about learning from our friends in the US… just working together, all workers in the ministry of God.”
