Waiting

Full confession: I am a control freak, Type A, excessively perfectionistic type of personality.

I hate it when I can’t figure something out or when someone rejects my perfect solution. I have tried and failed at doing puzzles because the mismatched pieces make me feel anxious. I hate numbers that don’t match, and I don’t clean my house because when I finally start, I can’t stop because everything must be absolutely in order as well as be absolutely clean. (To my mother who’s reading this: I hope you buy that excuse.) 

Since God made me this way, I try to be myself but I am also very aware of how much most people dislike excessively Type A personalities so I temper myself a lot. A happy medium if you will. Sometimes it works, other times it fails miserably.

Because of my personality being how it is, I usually spend excessive amounts of my day planning and trying to figure stuff out. You can find several worst case scenarios with solutions in my back pocket just in case - (yes, I have a 401k and a rainy day savings account that I check religiously). Because I cannot help myself, even my downtime is planned out so really, it's not downtime, it's just another box to check off of my list. Relaxation = done! Approaching it from that perspective belies the point but that's another subject for another time.

What does all of this mean? It really boils down to the fact that I’m horrible at waiting because I plan my life out so I don’t have to wait and thus, I have been rendered incredibly impatient. This differentiates me from precisely no one else on the planet because we all hate waiting - it's a universal human trait. It isn't clear if we were born impatient but somewhere along the line, we all became that way. Waiting is HARD and if you don’t do it right, it’s exhausting.

That last sentence may have caught you off guard. It’s fine, many people don’t think about waiting except to think about how much they hate it. Most of us don’t consider that there’s a wrong way and a right way to wait. But there are means and methods to both.

The Bible does speak about waiting but oftentimes not in a direct fashion. However, the Bible is full of people who waited. Off the top of my head, I can automatically think of four people who were great for God yet still spent most of their time…waiting. There is Job, who waited while everything was taken from him. There is Abraham, who waited a whole century for his son, Isaac. Moses, who spent 40  years waiting in the desert, wandering in circles. The Apostle Paul, many people don’t consider him as someone who waited, but he spent most of his time in prison writing letters and waiting to be free. All of them waited. All of them felt impatient. And luckily for us, their stories are written down so we can learn the right and wrong ways to wait.

I actually want to pull this verse from Isaiah that illustrates how to wait. It’s a famous verse, many people quote it consistently, and it’s fully relevant to what I’m writing today.

“But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

This verse is used as an encouragement tool to those who are waiting, as it very well should be. But if you look at it closely, it’s also a set of instructions on how to wait. Zing!

So what do you do while you’re waiting? First, you renew your strength. Renewing your strength makes it sound as though you completely stop what you’re doing but that’s actually not the case. Any athlete who runs or does weights knows that the best way to improve your performance is to keep on going. You give yourself routine breaks of course, but you always keep doing what you’re doing. You never stop. Part of renewing your strength is maybe to take a break from one area and focus on another. This is why people who are serious about building their muscles work out their legs one day, then the next day they work out a completely different part of their body. They don’t stop, except for maybe one day a week, but they alternate the areas they exercise. They switch it up. 

Alternating ties in with the second part of the verse – flying with the wings of eagles. Eagles are known for their ability to soar, to ride high above the clouds and above all the other birds. Occasionally it becomes necessary to adopt an eagle-like mentality. You have to take a break, remove yourself from the situation and try to give your brain a fresh start. Soaring like an eagle gives you the ability to approach things with a new perspective. It’s amazing how much you can learn when you look at things from the outside of a situation, and perhaps from another person’s point of view. When you’re waiting, this can be key especially if the situation you’re waiting on doesn’t seem to be moving in the slightest. Also, a key note to take from this…when you’re soaring like an eagle, mountains actually don’t seem that tall or that big. This can be helpful to remember because mountains usually come across as unbending, unyielding, and definitely non-climbable. If your problem looks mountain-like, and most of them usually do, then approach it like an eagle from far above. It will seem much smaller from up top.  

And finally, the last part of the verse entails running without being weary and walking without being faint. This means that you are to never stop moving while you’re waiting. I think this is the most important key to successful waiting. When you’re waiting, you don’t stop working. Sometimes it seems as though you are getting absolutely nowhere but rest assured, if you keep walking, keep moving, keep running, keep going forward, then the waiting will not be in vain. Because although sometimes we think we're waiting on God to start working, the truth might be that He's waiting on you.