The Hidden School of Waiting According to Andrew Murray
⏱ 8 min read
You feel unproductive in this season, and you are scared it is a waste. The calendar is still moving, the bills are still arriving, the work is still being done — and yet inwardly, the part of you that used to be growing has stopped showing visible growth. Andrew Murray, writing in Waiting on God, had a name for this stretch. He called it a school. A hidden one. The formation that happens in it, he insisted, cannot be done in any other classroom.
This is the question underneath the unease. Why does God make us wait? Not as a delay before the real thing. As the real thing. Murray’s claim — and he holds it through thirty-one short chapters — is that waiting forms what activity cannot. The unproductive season is not an interruption of your formation. It is your formation, taking the only shape some kinds of formation can take.
The slow daily companion for the inside of this stretch is the Dry Season Devotional — a 140-day walk built for the woman whose season has gone quiet and who needs a page that holds the rhythm of waiting at the pace she can actually bring. The article below is the short letter for the doorway.
Murray’s quiet correction
The first thing Murray does, in Day 18: Strong and of Good Courage and the chapters around it, is correct the assumption you have arrived with. You came in thinking waiting is what happens between two productive stretches. He gently turns that around.
“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 the last three short phrases of that passage again. Take heed and be quiet. In quietness shall be your strength. It is good that a man should quietly wait. Murray is not paraphrasing. Those are three separate scriptures stitched together because they teach the same one thing — that the quietness is the strength, that the waiting is the good, that what is being formed in the un-occupied stretch could not be formed any other way.
The hidden school, in Murray, has a curriculum the productive stretches cannot teach. The curriculum is the slow turning of the whole heart toward God, and the slow turning away from the noise of all that is not God. Activity, even devoted activity, keeps a small part of the heart turned toward the activity itself. Only the unproductive stretch dislodges that small remaining grip.
What only waiting can form
Here is the part that most depleted women, on first reading, want to argue with. Surely God could form me through activity too. Surely the productive stretches were also formation. They were. Murray does not deny it. But he holds out a kind of formation that only the empty stretch can do, and it is the kind the soul most needs at a certain depth.
It is the formation of the soul that knows it is not God. The soul that has at last accepted its own creatureliness. The soul that has stopped, even at the subtle level, attributing its strength to its own effort.
“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
That sentence is the whole school in one breath. The waiting on God is itself an unspeakable blessedness, one of the highest forms of fellowship with the Holy One. Murray is saying the waiting is not preparation for fellowship. The waiting is the fellowship. The unproductive stretch is not the absence of the real thing. It is the form the real thing takes when the soul is being taught what no productive stretch can teach it.
This is the answer to why does God make us wait, in Murray’s hand. Because there is a fellowship with God that only opens to the still soul, and the still soul does not exist until the productive engines have at last been turned off.
A minute for the body
Stop reading for sixty seconds. Sit with both feet flat. Let the jaw release. Let the shoulders, which have been holding the question of your usefulness this whole season, come down by an inch. Let one slow inhale come in. Let one slow exhale go out. Stay in the stopping for the full minute, by the clock.
You are not being asked to enjoy it. You are being asked to notice that your body, when it stops, does not immediately collapse. It rests. The school Murray is naming begins exactly there — in the body’s first willingness to do nothing for one minute and not be punished for it.
The 31-day shape of the school
Murray did not write Waiting on God as theology. He wrote it as a thirty-one day course, one short chapter for each day of the month, on the same single posture, walked through thirty-one different windows. The form is the message. He did not believe you could be taught what waiting forms by reading a chapter on it once. He believed you had to walk a chapter a day on it for a month, and then probably the next month too.
That structural choice is itself an answer to the question. Why does God make us wait? Because the formation Murray is naming is not the kind that takes in one reading. It takes by accumulation — by the slow daily return, day eight after day seven after day six, until the soul has at last stopped resisting the school and has settled in.
(For the chapter-a-day form of this same Murray walk, the 31-day practice Andrew Murray built around one verse walks the shape of his book itself, and what Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God actually asks of you walks the foundational posture beneath the whole month. The longer pastoral letter for the inside of the dryness is feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence.)
What the unproductive stretch is doing
Three things, in Murray’s reading, are being done in the hidden school — and they are the things the productive stretches could not have done in you.
The first is the humbling. Not as condemnation, but as right-sizing. The soul that has waited for a long stretch knows in the bones that it is not God, and that knowing changes how it prays, how it works, how it loves. It is a knowing that no successful season can give, because success keeps suggesting, very quietly, that the soul itself was the source.
The second is the re-rooting. The fellowship with God that opens in the still stretch is a fellowship the noisy stretch cannot make room for. Murray uses the word blessedness and means it specifically — a being-with that does not require any deliverable from you, that is its own contents, that fills the inner life with God Himself rather than with the felt rewards of devotion.
The third is the strengthening — and this is the surprise. In quietness shall be your strength. The strength Murray is naming is not the strength to do more. It is the strength to do what God will ask next, when He asks it, without the soul running on its own residual fuel. The unproductive stretch is the refueling, done by Him, in a tank you cannot fill from outside.
(The slow daily companion for this hidden school is the Dry Season Devotional — the page that holds the rhythm when your own inner rhythm has not yet returned. It is the form Murray’s thirty-one days takes when stretched across the longer season the depleted soul actually walks. For the year-long version of the same dryness, the practice for the year God goes quiet walks the slower companion.)
The Murray line to keep near the page
If you take only one line into the rest of the week, take this one:
The waiting on God is itself an unspeakable blessedness, one of the highest forms of fellowship with the Holy One.
The waiting is the fellowship. The unproductive stretch is not the wasted year. It is the hidden school in which the soul is being formed in ways no productive year could have formed it. Why does God make us wait? Because the school only opens to the still soul, and the still soul is what He is making, slowly, in you.
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The 140-day form of this slow practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
We also intend, in time, to bring Waiting on God itself back into print under Everspring Press, so Murray’s thirty-one days can sit beside the longer companion that walks the school they open.
The Everspring Dry Season Devotional walks the formation of the still soul at the pace of one short page per day. Built for the woman whose season has gone quiet and who is ready, slowly, to let the hidden school do the work no productive stretch could have done.
