Andrew Murray on Waiting Without Drift
⏱ 11 min read
Waiting feels like wasted time and you cannot tell what you should be doing. The season has slowed — the door you were expecting to open has not opened, the season you were expecting to close has not closed — and the in-between has stretched into a small steady restlessness, because the activist part of you suspects that real faith would be doing something more visible than sitting in the chair. You have read, more than once, that you are supposed to wait on the Lord. You are not sure what the waiting is supposed to actually look like in a Tuesday afternoon when the day is not asking anything in particular of you.
Andrew Murray, writing in the day-ten reading of Waiting on God, named this exact confusion and gave it a careful answer. The waiting Murray is teaching is not idle. It is also not striving. It is, in his careful theology, active passivity — the soul that is quietly attentive to God, with no work of its own to do, but with every faculty turned toward Him in a posture that is the opposite of drift. What is waiting on god, in Murray’s sense, is this: the active stillness of a soul that has stopped its own striving without falling into its own drift. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional is the companion practice for exactly this stretch — the small daily page that holds the soul in active waiting without asking it to manufacture activity that is not its to do. For now, read slowly. The article is the slow read of the posture itself.
The reason this matters is that the two failures most modern Christians fall into, in a waiting season, are at opposite ends. The first failure is striving — filling the silence with religious activity that was never asked for, in the hope that the busyness will compensate for the absence of clear direction. The second failure is drift — allowing the absence of clear direction to become the absence of any attention at all, the soul simply going quiet, the chair stopping being sat in, the verse stopping being read. Murray’s whole project, in the patient-waiting chapters, is to teach the third posture that sits between the two. Active. Quiet. Attentive. Doing no work of its own — but present, fixed, and facing Him.
The first passage — day by day set ourselves at His feet
“Come, my brethren, and let us day by day set ourselves at His feet, and meditate on this word of His, with an eye fixed on Him alone. Let us set ourselves in quiet trust before Him, waiting to hear His holy voice — the still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks — breathing its quickening spirit within us, as He speaks: ‘Abide in me.’ The soul that truly hears Jesus Himself speak the word, receives with the word the power to accept and to hold the blessing He offers.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice that every verb in the passage is active. Set ourselves. Meditate. Fix. Wait. Hear. Receive. These are not the verbs of drift. The soul that is doing all of these things is doing real inward work — it is not, anywhere, vacant. It is also not striving. None of the verbs are produce, achieve, generate. The activity is the activity of attending, not the activity of making. This is the precise category Murray is naming. The waiting is busy in its attention and empty in its production. The soul is fully occupied — fixed on Him alone — and is, at the same time, not trying to do His work for Him.
The soul that truly hears Jesus Himself speak the word, receives with the word the power to accept and to hold the blessing He offers. This is the line that explains why active passivity is the right posture for the waiting stretch. The hearing is real work; it requires the soul to be present, attentive, fixed. The power to accept and to hold is what is then given. The soul does the hearing. God does the giving. The two together are waiting on God in its mature form. The activity is the hearing. The passivity is the receiving. Neither, on its own, is the practice. The two together are.
This is why drift is the wrong response to a waiting season. The drift assumes the waiting has no work in it. Murray is saying the waiting has real work — the work of attending. The attending is not less than action. It is, in fact, the kind of action only the soul that has stopped striving can finally do, because the striving soul is too busy producing to be present to receive.
A small thing for your body
Pause for a moment. Active waiting has a body to it, and the body is often the part that has slipped into drift while the mind has been worrying about whether it is striving enough.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat against the floor. Notice the spine — it has, in the waiting season, often slumped slightly, because the body has been mirroring the inward sense that there is nothing to do. Let the spine lengthen, very slightly. Not into rigidity. Into attention. The body of active waiting is upright but soft — the body of someone who is present at a small bedside, attending, without needing to do anything in particular.
Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out. Now let the inward word here arise — just the word — and let it be addressed, plainly, to the One who is in the room. Here. Once. The word is the whole prayer of active waiting in its smallest form. Present, attentive, doing no work, fully facing Him. Stay there for a few breaths. The next sentence is here when you are ready.
The second passage — take heed and be quiet
The second passage is from earlier in Waiting on God, where Murray sets out the inward stillness that the active waiting is built on:
“If we are to have our whole heart turned towards God, we must have it turned away from the creature, from all that occupies and interests, whether of joy or sorrow. God is a being of such infinite greatness and glory, and our nature has become so estranged from Him, that it needs our whole heart and desires set upon Him, even in some little measure to know and receive Him. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. The message is one of deep meaning: ‘Take heed and be quiet;’ ‘In quietness shall be your strength;’ ‘It is good that a man should quietly wait.’”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it twice. Slowly.
Take heed and be quiet. This is the imperative pair at the heart of Murray’s active passivity. Take heed — be alert, be attentive, be present. Be quiet — produce nothing, strive for nothing, generate nothing. The two together are the whole practice. The soul that only takes heed but does not become quiet has slid into striving. The soul that only becomes quiet but does not take heed has slid into drift. The two-fold imperative is the corrective for both failures. Murray is teaching the posture in which the two are held together — alert and still, attentive and unproductive, fully present and doing nothing.
Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. Notice what Murray is naming as hindrances. Not just the obvious distractions. Hopes and gladness are also on the list. The soul that is being moved by anything other than God — even by good religious emotion — is, in Murray’s careful reading, no longer in perfect waiting. The waiting posture is the inward stilling that has stopped being moved even by the spiritually-positive interior weather, so that the soul can be present to God Himself without the interior weather mediating. This is a high posture. Murray is not asking you to arrive at it in a week. He is naming it so the slow daily practice has a target — so the soul knows what it is slowly turning toward across the months.
It is good that a man should quietly wait. The verb quietly is doing important work. Not passively — which would risk drift. Not energetically — which would risk striving. Quietly. The middle posture. Active passivity. The journal companion built for exactly this slow daily quieting — for the page that does not demand striving and does not permit drift — is the Dry Season Devotional. It holds the active-attentive form of the waiting practice for the long stretch when the season has not yet turned.
The third passage — waiting is itself an unspeakable blessedness
The third passage is the one that completes Murray’s account of why active waiting is not, in fact, wasted time:
“As long as the waiting on God is chiefly regarded as an end towards more effectual prayer, and the obtaining of our petitions, this spirit of perfect quietness will not be obtained. But when it is seen that the waiting on God is itself an unspeakable blessedness, one of the highest forms of fellowship with the Holy One, the adoration of Him in His glory will of necessity humble the soul into a holy stillness, making way for God to speak and reveal Himself.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it slowly. Notice the inversion in the middle.
The waiting on God is itself an unspeakable blessedness. This is the line that, for the activist Christian woman, has to be received slowly because it overturns the inward assumption she has been carrying. The assumption is that waiting is the means, and the answer or breakthrough is the end. Murray says no. The waiting is itself the end. The waiting is itself the fellowship. The waiting is itself the blessedness. The soul that has finally received this is the soul that can stop trying to use the waiting to produce something else, and can settle, instead, into the waiting as the thing that is itself what God is giving.
This is the deepest answer to the question of what is waiting on god. Not a holding pattern. Not a delay before the real life resumes. The waiting is, in Murray’s reading, one of the highest forms of fellowship with the Holy One. The active passivity is the posture in which this fellowship is actually received. The drift cannot receive it because the drift is not attending. The striving cannot receive it because the striving is too busy producing. The middle posture — alert, quiet, fixed, doing no work of its own — is the one in which the fellowship is finally allowed to be the thing the waiting is for.
The adoration of Him in His glory will of necessity humble the soul into a holy stillness, making way for God to speak and reveal Himself. Notice the order again. The stillness is not directly produced; it is the by-product of adoration. The soul that has settled into adoration — attention turned fully to God, in active waiting — is the soul into which the holy stillness of necessity enters. The stillness is His to give. The adoration is yours to offer. The slow daily small chair-time is the room in which the offering happens and the stillness is allowed to follow.
(For the foundation reading, what Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God actually asks of you walks the posture. The 31-day practice Andrew Murray built around one verse is the slow daily method, and why Andrew Murray said God waits longer than we do is the line worth keeping near the chair on the days the silence weighs heaviest. If the waiting season has also become a dry one, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence is the bridge letter.)
What active waiting actually looks like, on a Tuesday afternoon
Not nothing. Not striving. The small daily return to the chair. The verse, slowly. The fixed eye, for a few minutes. The honest sentence, written by hand. The slow exhale. The here, addressed plainly to the One in the room. Then the day goes on — the laundry, the email, the small ordinary work — but the soul that has done the morning’s small active waiting carries the attentive posture into the rest of the day, even when the day is not religious in shape. The active waiting is not what you do at the chair. The active waiting is the inward posture the chair-time establishes, that then quietly holds the rest of the day.
This is what is waiting on god in Murray’s careful sense. Not idle drift. Not anxious striving. The middle posture of the soul that has stopped its own work without abandoning its attention — present, fixed, quiet, facing Him — and that has discovered, slowly, that the waiting is itself the fellowship the soul has been waiting for the whole time.
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The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
Everspring is, in due course, planning a careful typeset reprint of Murray’s Waiting on God for the contemplative reader — the journal above is the daily companion for the active-waiting stretch, and the book itself, in time, will be the slow chair-time partner alongside it.
