Trains, buses, meetings to end, summer, spring, winter to end, families to arrive, holidays to come, holidays to end, vacations, the roast to be done, elevators, seedlings, appointments, babies, good news, these are all things we at some point wait for.
But now everything happens faster. Mail replaced pony express. Telephones replaced mail. Texts replace phone calls and thank you notes and party invitations and announcements. And so waiting has become obsolete. There is so much busyness and distraction waiting almost doesn’t happen.
But there it is. The medical test they gave you Friday and won’t give results till Monday. You wait. You can wait gracefully or anxiously. By the end of the wait you can have convinced yourself of horrible things, or not.
Waiting is an art. Kind of like aging.
My dad did not go gentle into that good night. Not at all. At the end he was so angry. He wanted me to give him something he could break. All I found was a straw. Not very gratifying.
My mom would plant tiny spring flowers. They would begin to take root and she would check them each day, pulling a little on their leaves and tender stems. The ones that survived this encouragement lived and bloomed, but she had a hard time waiting for them.
When we’re hungry it is hard to wait for food. Mostly we don’t have to, stuff is so instant now. Fast food drive through or microwave, in a matter of moments steaming hot food is available. Food in some form.
Sometimes problems or thoughts wake me in the night. And sometimes these thoughts do not surface, so I am left wondering why, after only 5 hours of sleep I am now wide-awake wondering what I am supposed to be thinking of. So I wait for whatever it is to surface. Invariably it doesn’t, or my brain bombards me with a hundred thoughts of that day’s sentences I heard, questions asked, arguments thwarted, incomplete thoughts… anything and everything except whatever it is that woke me. Sometimes it will come to me and I can work through it but sometimes it does not. So until or unless I can go back to sleep I wait for morning.
Somehow everything is better in daylight.
And I have many things I pray about. Family things, social things, political things. Anyway, stuff I have no control over. Stuff I need God to fix, or change, or stop, or start.
So I pray, and I wait. I try to be good at this. I realize many components go into effecting change. And I know nothing is impossible with God. Yet some things do not happen when I believe they should. Or if they do I would have done them a certain other way. Sometimes they may not happen at all. But I have to trust God. I have to wait for God’s timing.
This isn’t easy, but it is the best way.
Rescue dog Lulu has mastered the Art of Waiting
“Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors.” Proverbs 8:34
“Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain.” James 5:7
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