All the people at this table are intentional about helping people in Portugal experience God through community and church planting.
Fourteen Years
One of the church planters we met in Portugal has been at it for fourteen years.
They now have about thirty people gathering weekly as a church.
Another has four small groups after three years. About forty people altogether.
Then Lino, the pastor of Igreja a Ponte, told us Portugal is now about 2% evangelical. That didn’t sound like much until he told us that ten years ago, it was less than 1%.
Portugal’s own census tells a similar story. Evangelicals more than doubled between 2011 and 2021, and many of them are Brazilians who moved here.
Thirty people in fourteen years. Twice as many evangelicals in ten.
This is what waiting for God can look like. Slow enough to miss if you only look at one year.
This week I’ve been memorizing a two-psalm set about waiting. Psalms 42 and 43 open Book Two of the Psalms, and they are almost certainly one song. They share the same chorus, and Psalm 43 doesn’t have a title.
When I memorize a psalm, I build a series of scenes in my head. A path for my thoughts to follow. This song has three scenes. After that, we’ll follow Jesus into a garden where we can see three ways to wait.
Scene One: A Thirsty Deer
Psalm 42:1–5
As the deer pants for the water brooks, So my soul pants for You, God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; When shall I come and appear before God?
The author isn’t asking for a better job, or a healing, or an answer. He wants God. He wants to be back in God’s presence. He used to walk with the crowds, leading them to the house of God, with joy and thanksgiving, a multitude celebrating a festival.
Picture a leader who can’t get back to the place he used to lead.
Now tears are his food, day and night, and people keep asking him, “Where is your God?”
The leader talks to his soul:
Why are you in despair, my soul? And why are you restless within me? Wait for God, for I will again praise Him For the help of His presence, my God.
During our low seasons, our inner thoughts can get really loud. The psalmist talks back.
In Hebrew, the word for “wait” here is also the word for “hope.” Many Bibles translate it “Hope in God.” In this psalm, waiting and hoping are one and the same.
Scene Two: Waterfalls
Psalm 42:6–11
Now he is far from Jerusalem, remembering God “from the land of the Jordan and the peaks of Hermon.”
Up there, water is everywhere. That’s where the Jordan begins, where the snowmelt off Mount Hermon comes boiling down. And the thirsty man is suddenly drowning.
Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls; All Your breakers and Your waves have passed over me.
In verse 1, he couldn’t find water. In verse 7, there’s too much of it.
And look whose waves they are. Your waves. He doesn’t pretend God is absent from the flood. That’s a hard sentence to pray. It’s also an honest one.
Then, right in the middle of the waves:
The LORD will send His goodness in the daytime; And His song will be with me in the night.
And then he asks the question so many of us ask:
I will say to God my rock, “Why have You forgotten me?”
He calls God his rock and asks Him why He forgot. In the same breath. Waiting for God, it turns out, includes telling Him the truth.
And then he repeats the words to his soul:
Why are you in despair, my soul? And why are you restless within me? Wait for God, for I will again praise Him For the help of His presence, my God.
Scene Three: The Road Up the Hill
Psalm 43
And then things get worse.
Now there’s an ungodly nation. And a deceitful and unjust person against him.
He asks God, “Why have You rejected me?”
His next prayer request explains to God how He could resolve the challenge:
Send out Your light and Your truth, they shall lead me; They shall bring me to Your holy hill And to Your dwelling places.
In Psalm 42 the psalmist asked, “When shall I come?”
Now he asks God: Please do Your part, so I can do mine. With Your light and Your truth, I will be in Your presence again.
“Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy.” One more time, the psalmist speaks to his own soul:
Why are you in despair, my soul? And why are you restless within me? Wait for God, for I will again praise Him For the help of His presence, my God.
Same chorus, three times. His situation keeps changing. The chorus doesn’t. So what does waiting for God actually look like? Jesus shows us.
Three Ways to Wait, in One Garden
On the night before He died, Jesus took His friends into Gethsemane and said, “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death” (Mark 14:34).
The Greek translation of the Psalms, the Bible many of Jesus’ first followers read, uses that same word in this chorus: “Why are you deeply grieved, my soul?” In His darkest night, Jesus seems to reach for the language of Psalm 42.
In that one garden, you can see three ways to wait.
The disciples fell asleep. That’s passive waiting.
Peter pulled a sword and cut off a servant’s ear (John 18:10). That’s taking matters into your own hands.
Jesus prayed. He told His Father the truth: “Remove this cup from Me.” He surrendered: “Yet not what I will, but what You will.” Then He stood up and said, “Get up, let’s go” (Mark 14:36, 42). And He walked toward the cross. That’s active waiting.
Honest prayer. Surrender. Then the obvious next step, even when it costs everything.
What Waiting Felt Like for Deanna
Deanna shared some of her story at a church in Porto.
“I was here in March 2025. When I got back to Brazil, I discovered I had breast cancer. Our plans changed quickly as we prayed and tried to understand what to do. I felt very cared for and prayed for that whole season.
I am now cancer-free.
But then, suddenly, I felt out on my own. And was the cancer really gone? Post-cancer became another difficult stretch we didn’t see coming.
But we keep going with the light we have.”
My Mornings
My life is going by very quickly. I never seem to have enough hours for everything I want to do. In the past, I might have worked harder, or longer hours. By God’s grace, some of that produced lasting fruit. Much of it did not.
I’ve learned that active waiting starts with real waiting, followed by obediently taking the next steps. Sometimes those steps are risks of faith.
For me, active waiting includes starting each day and each week with God. Often it looks something like this:
Enough daily time in Bible study
Enough daily time in Centering Prayer
Enough daily time to pray through lists
One sabbath rest day every seven days
Praying through my lists has become asking God how I can serve those people better, in His name.
I often do not feel like I have the time to take a day off every week. I race the clock, take a disciplined stop, and I love the day of rest. It’s a gift from God. And I usually get to bed early, because I can hardly wait to start my next six-day stretch. I feel very blessed.
There’s no formula for waiting. It’s personal, and it changes with needs and seasons. I share mine only as a starter idea, in case anyone feels stuck.
For This Week
What are you waiting on God for right now?
Where are you tempted to check out, letting God do whatever He wants while you go do something else?
Where are you tempted to reach for the sword?
What would it look like to tell God the truth today, and then take one obvious next step?
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A Prayer
Lord,
Like the deer, We are thirsty for You.
Some of us are in a dry place. Some of us are under the waves.
You are our rock, even when it feels like You’ve forgotten. Send out Your light and Your truth, and let them lead us.
Keep us from sleeping, And from grabbing the sword.
Give us Your song in the night, And the courage to get up and take the next step.
We will wait for You. We will praise You again.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Portugal
Is the fruit on Beth’s property any indication of the fruit ripe for the picking in Portugal?
We spent our first week in Porto, in the north of Portugal, staying with Beth, a missionary kid who has a guest house. Beth says her mission people saw a vision of God’s fire starting in Portugal and spreading through Europe.
This week we’re in Brussels, visiting two Vineyard churches. At an all-day conference, we had time to talk with many Christians. Several told me they don’t share their faith publicly. They face discrimination, and a lot of negative generalizations about Christianity.
One leader told me that only 1% of people in Brussels are part of churches that preach about a personal relationship with Jesus. I haven’t checked that number. But if he’s even close, most people in this city have never been invited to walk with God, day by day. And yet there are huge, beautiful churches everywhere.
Let’s think about this.
Starting churches is messy. Think of the early church, or any missionary story you know. As churches grow, people want safe places to worship, and less mess. Over time, it’s easy to end up with a system like the one Jesus kept running into: lots of religion, and so much safety that nobody needs God to show up.
And then, maybe you can identify with this, it’s easy to get distracted. Pretty soon, the culture doesn’t need church either. In the Netherlands alone, about 1,700 of roughly 7,000 churches have already closed or been sold.
What would happen, just thinking out loud, if God showed up again, like He did in Jesus, or with the early church? When safe systems feel change coming, they get anxious. Emotions boil over, or go freezing cold. It gets messy again.
Are we up for it?
The man in Psalm 42 didn’t want a safe system. He wanted God.
Wait for God, for I will again praise Him For the help of His presence, my God (Psalm 43:5).
What do you think? Hit reply. I’d love to hear.
Please pray with us:
For wisdom about how God wants us to help in Portugal and Europe
For the Christians we met in Brussels, for courage to share their faith
For Clenildo and the many pastors on retreat on the Xingu River
For the church planters we met in Portugal, as they keep waiting for fruit
That increasing numbers of people in Europe, Brazil, North America, and around the world will experience the meaningful joy of actively waiting for Jesus’ return
With gratitude, Rick and Deanna
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Scripture quotations are from the NASB 2020 unless otherwise noted.
