The wonders of waiting

The waiting room might be one of the worst places on the planet. 

I'm already not the most patient person, but I think this particular setting can drive even the calmest person to madness.

First of all, you aren't always there for positive reasons (though sometimes you are), and having to wait when you're already not in the best of spirits is no way to make a smile dance across your face. It seems like time drags on forever and that you've entered into some alternative universe—maybe even the Twilight Zone—where you will never escape.

Frustrations galore.

The waiting room isn't always glamorous.

And it certainly doesn't help that you are completely helpless in such situations. You are there for a purpose and have to stick around until said purpose is completed, otherwise you've really just wasted precious time in your life. You can't leave, and there's nothing you can do to make any part of the process go faster. In fact, the more you complain, the more awful it's going to seem. Suddenly everyone around you becomes completely incompetent, even though there is usually nothing those individuals can do to make matters better, either.

So you sit and wait.

I think far too often in life we feel trapped in waiting rooms, but we don't actually wait for the moments for our names to be called, so to speak. Rather, we try to take matters into our own hands, which quite frequently ends up blowing up in our faces. Later we realize that, if we could have just had as much as a smidgen of patience, then the chaos and troubles that ensued would not have interrupted our lives. We should have just waited.

Patience has never been my strongest suit, and I will admit right now that I sometimes get extremely agitated when I have to wait. I try to tell God this and that I need Him to work faster, but He actually works on His own time. It probably gives Him a slight chuckle when we try to change that up. But He's teaching me to be more patient on a daily basis, and I truly need it. I think that's one reason He made me a teacher—that has taught me more patience that I've ever known, and it's trickled into other parts of my life, as well.

What I love is that the waiting room for God is so much better than a waiting room anywhere else. Instead of dread and bad smells, there is hope and purity. In place of awkward silence and simultaneous loud chaos, we find peace and joy. The waiting room for Him is actually quite pleasant—if we let it be.

God doesn't make us wait because there are too many of His children to tend to or because He wants us to be unhappy. Rather, He grants us with these times of waiting to deepen our trust in and dependence on Him and so that everything can happen according to His perfect will and on His flawless watch.

I know God has a path for me to take, and there are certain reasons why I'm having to discover patience within me that I never thought I had. There is even one area of my life (dating—or, actually, not dating) where I feel so perfectly content with His timing right now that it almost makes me wonder how He calmed my heart this much. But He did, and I will wait.

We won't always understand why God wants us to wait in certain situations and why things can't just happen when we want them to, but that's where faith has to be at work. We have no idea what's going to happen or when, but we simply have to believe that He's going to take care of us. We can't keep looking at our watches and tapping our feet in these times—we just have to let things happen on the one watch that we can never see.

The waiting room doesn't have to be a place of stress and time constraints; instead it can be a place where we can find rest and truth in Christ—a place where we can breathe and relax knowing that He's got the whole world in His hands.