Waiting

The picture of waiting makes me cringe. I look at the one with the bicycle and I think “that would be me”…. stuck waiting at the wrong end of a long line of other people waiting. It would be no different than waiting in the check-out line at the grocery store, or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office—especially if your doctor aced the final in “how to create a boring waiting room” 101. You do get why they call them waiting rooms, right?

If you’ve ever been on any freeway–anywhere–you’ve seen me. I’m that idiot that will always move over to the other lane because it is faster, only to find out that as soon as I move over, I’m waiting once again and all of those who were in my original lane are now moving past me. Yep, that’s me and that’s what waiting does for me. And to me. There’s an old family story that when I was born and standing on the line to get my ration of patience, they ran out and that’s why I have always been so impatient.

As I’ve gotten older I have though more and more that the old family story is just that–a story. I think the truth of the matter is that my patience issue has always been a part of God’s plan for me. I would never be able to learn patience unless I was very impatient first. While that may seem obvious, consider this; aren’t the majority of really great life lessons learned out of pain and/or real discomfort? Out of failures? Out of mistakes? I submit that in my case at least, the answer would be a resounding “yes”. I don’t learn so well out of successes and feeling good. The more I have to squirm over a situation, the more I will learn what not to do. So it is with me and patience–I simply need to squirm to learn.

Here’s a thing about waiting. As I see it, God is a God of wait. Right out of the shoot we could talk about eternity–we are promised that it will be so much better than life here on earth, and we have to wait–not only to get there, but to see how much better it is (and the word sugars that by sharing with us that it is better than anything we can ever imagine). I seriously don’t think that I want to get impatient thinking about that, so I’ll just believe it in faith, so I don’t have to get impatient.

How about waiting when it comes to prayers? Whoa…. God is still a God of wait there as well. I never kept score, because somehow it just doesn’t seem right to me to keep a score card on God, but I would be inclined to think that the majority of His answers to prayers are still resting in the “let’s wait on that one” column. In fact, the fact that some are in that column in the first place could be the answer to some of those prayers.

“But as for me, I will look to the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.“

Micah 7:7

I believe that piece of scripture and the multitude of related scriptures pertaining to patience and waiting for God. Why do I so easily forget it or ignore it when I am in that line on the freeway, or when I am demanding that one of my foxhole prayers get answered “right now”? Could it be it’s because in each case I caused my own anguish or situation and my forgetfulness about that scripture is God’s way of telling me that he’s going to be patient with me as I learn, once again, that a God of wait is a pretty good thing.

I’ll be waiting to see how this all pans out.