Much of the language around waiting quietly confuses trust with passivity. In the biblical narratives, waiting is almost always occupied. Joseph administers a prison. Ruth gleans. David keeps sheep for years after being anointed. Paul makes tents. The waiting is long and mostly unexplained, and nobody is idle inside it - more often than not the waiting turns out to have been the preparation, not an interruption of it.

A distinction helps: what is mine, and what is not. Whether the door opens is not yours. Whether you are the sort of person who could walk through it is entirely yours, and that includes ordinary means - the CV, the savings, the qualification, the medical advice, the counsel of people honest enough to tell you the truth. Treating them as a failure of faith is a recent distortion; the older tradition holds diligence and dependence together as partners, and treats daily work as one of the ways provision arrives.

There is also room for honest lament, worth saying because so few congregations make space for it. The Psalms are full of how long, and the question is never treated as unbelief. If the waiting has made you angry, the tradition has language for that, and your community should be able to hear it without rushing to correct you. A faith that only permits cheerfulness cannot carry a real life.