Hurry-up and Wait

Days 18-23
Gen 37:1-47:31
Matt 12:22-15:28
Psalm 16:1-19:14
Proverbs 3:27-4:19

I always laugh a little, while caged within the masses of heavy traffic, at that one driver smarter than the rest of us who decides to gun it and pass everyone on the wrong side of the road.  Inevitably five minutes up the road, there he sits, blinkers glaring as he waits to get back into the stream of traffic snailing forward.  His need to hurry and beat the crowd leaves him back further than where he started.

Waiting has become a lost art in our culture where immediate gratification reigns.  WAIT: the action of staying where one is-  delaying a time - until something else happens.  The word wait is a verb.  A verb is a word that describes an action, state or occurence.

I hate to wait around doing nothing.  It is inherent of our culture to keep busy, moving forward, progressing.  As I continue to be faithful in this reading it has been brought to my attention how much God called the people of the bible to wait.  Noah waited what must have seemed an eternity, couped up on that boat with literally every walk of animal life as well as his entire family.  God told him to wait until He gave the okay to set foot on dry land.  Abraham and Sarah were told to wait for a son.  Nearly one hundred years they waited.  Jacob worked for 7 years to get Rebekah's hand, and then another seven years to pay her off and own her outright.  In my own spiritual journey I can track my times of waiting in the desert.  These times are always followed up with growth of one kind or another.  Yet I still expect immediate answers to my prayers and still I loathe the waiting on God.  Realizing now that to wait is an action, not an idleness, I find myself anxious to see what might be in store if I am actually able to hone this into a skill, or at least see the waiting as an action and not a complete waste of time.

My daughter and son-in-law and their family moved in to our house almost two months ago.  Since that day we have all been actively praying for their Portland home to sell, not because we don't like co-habitating.  I just know they need their privacy and with two of their three little boys having special needs, this family needs their routines and a sense of order to their everyday life.  In turn, they are very respectful of our privacy and worry about over staying their welcome.  So the logical answer is for their house to sell so they can get back to their life.  Everything is on hold until this one thing happens.  People close to us are facing challenges in their workplace, everything could be immediately improved if some obvious changes could take place, but these changes require...waiting.  Waiting for a chain of events to occur in order to get on with life as they know it.  Possible oppurtunities are knocking in other parts of my life, oppurtunities with an infinite list of unknowns.  Oppurtunities that may require stepping out in faith, but before the stepping out part can happen, waiting is required.  So in the meantime everything seems like it is in limbo because nothing happens while we wait right?  I don't think so.  We wait for nine months to have a baby.  Major miraculous unseen things are happening as the fetus grows and forms all the integral parts for that infant to function outside the body.  When winter sets in and the earth seems dead for months, nature is taking the necessary steps to burst into rebirth, but we see nothing on the topside as we wait for spring.  This concept is probably an obvious fact to the rest of the world, but as my youngest son likes to say, 'mom's not always the sharpest knife in the drawer '(he says this with the utmost love and respect and strangely no one else in my family ever feels a need to defend me). This has been a revelation to me, like a sack of rocks smack in my face revelation.  It excites me and gives me hope that God is listening, things are changing, maybe even I am changing when nothing seems to be happening.  Being the impatient person that I am I now find myself anxious to hurry up and wait.