The Waiting

When I hear people say they are in a season of waiting or they are in the wait, it makes me think of a room with nothing but an empty chair or it makes me think of months of sitting at a table with nothing to do.

I, like most people in this world, am not a very patient person. I like to have things to do and places to go and when I'm finished with that I'm ready for the next place or the next thing. I also struggle with being satisfied with my circumstance. I compare my normal everyday the the high points of other peoples lives on social media.

Now let me just stop there and make something clear. I compare my normal day. This means I take my Monday when I have a day off from work where I put in a load of laundry, clean up the house a little, watch a movie, plan a little party, go to the chiropractor, hit the gym, and take a shower and I compare that single day to someone else's lifetime. I compare that Monday to a day where someone took road trip 2 weeks ago to hike in the mountains and get away from the busyness of their life.

Reading that just makes me sound crazy. People are like, "Well, Lauren, of course you don't feel successful or accomplished your comparing one of your many normal days to someone else's one rare day." But I guarantee that some of you reading this do the same thing. You wonder how they got to go on a hiking trip for a few days and how they could afford that while you're stuck still working and feeling like you never have enough money to do anything fun or exciting. When that thought comes forward, you must pause and think, what were those people doing while you were on vacation last year? What were they doing every Friday night while you got to hang with friends? Maybe, they were working so they could pay to go on that trip.

This is something that is so hard to discern with social media. People have the ability to post a picture of their vacation they took three months ago and somehow make you feel bad that you're not on a vacation right now. There are also people who post pictures that aren't even real! I saw this behind-the-scene post the other day and it showed pictures of people who put a beach background up on their computer and put their face in front of it and had the caption say enjoying a day a the beach. I've seen pictures of people who go into a home goods store and use the store's product to make it look like they just remodeled their room when they are just taking a picture of themselves in the display room at the store!

We see these pictures and ask ourselves when our time will come. When will we get to go on vacation? When will we get the money to buy new furniture? Well, from what I've learned, that's exactly the opposite of what Jesus wants the wait to be like.

My experience with the wait has been a little different. I've been working part-time for four years now and I've been out of school for a year and a half. I worked on flipping a mobile home, which took us about three months, and now we're done so I'm back to just working part-time and I am bored. I've been waiting for a full-time job because I didn't know how quickly the mobile home gig was going to pick up so I wanted to have flexibility just in case.

I have also been picky when looking for a full-time job because the way I was raised made it seem like once you get a full-time job, you will be doing it for awhile.

So I decided to look at full-time jobs again the other day and saw one at the Church that I attend so I applied for it. It sounded like the perfect job for me. I still haven't heard back so now I'm in the waiting for a job that I am actually excited about and it's nerve-racking. I don't know how long it will take to even get a response, but I'm waiting because I want this job quit a bit.

The thing that I've learned about waiting is it's not sitting in that room on the chair and waiting for someone to walk in the door to give you a job. It's not sitting at the table for months waiting for your relationship to just magically work again. Waiting is work. It's finding new opportunities like a new part-time job or reading a book about how to love your significant other again. The wait is also not beating yourself up for not having a full-time job while being a part of three different groups plus doing volunteer work on the weekends.

The waiting is where God meets us as long as we are faithful.

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Be Still and Know