This week’s giveaway (on a field trip!) waiting for me to hear who was supposed to receive it.

I have a confession to make.  I am not terribly good at waiting.  Yet.  Waiting implies something is coming but hasn’t come yet.  It is a state of in-betweenness that really can be quite…irritating. I have never found it an easy thing to do.  I wish I could be better at the wait. I instinctively know that waiting is important, but I still find it hard.

Sometimes it’s the simple things I have trouble waiting for.  The water to boil in the teapot so I can make the morning coffee, or miles to fade until we get to our vacation spot.  But sometimes, it is a bit bigger. Sometimes it is waiting for the right words to come,  or waiting for an answer to prayer, or waiting to figure out what my next steps should be.  

This week’s giveaway saw me waiting to find the right person to gift to.  Have no fear–I am not sitting on a loaf in my house as it grows stale still trying to choose.  I found the right person, the lovely mother of a friend who is having a birthday this weekend. I am sure birthday bread is a thing, right?  Well, it is now regardless, and she was so pleased, and so was I. But I did have to wait a bit to hear her name. Her bread even came with me on a field trip to a concert in the park this week to see if it belonged to someone there.  But it already had an intended home; I just needed to wait to hear it.

I guess it is probably a by-product of my nature and our results-focused culture, that makes me want to be productive, to solve the challenge in front of me on my own, and not sit passively by waiting.

Dr. Seuss, that entertainer of children and speaker of truths talks about the dreaded waiting place in the graduation classic, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”  In the story, the hero, who in moving on from a hang-up and a bang-up tries desperately to get on with the important things in life.

You can get so confused
that you’ll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place…

Ah, Dr. Seuss, you have done it again!  You have totally nailed a life truth, all in verse.  The first part makes so much sense. You want to move beyond this wait, so you race on, but the trouble is, you are not going anywhere really.  You are simply doing to be doing, moving to be moving. And then, you stop, you give up, and you wait.

And here is where I must have a small quibble with Dr. Seuss.  He describes the waiting place in the most dreary terms. It is all about people waiting for things to happen to them and seems completely devoid of hope and passive in nature, it is “useless.”  However, I don’t think the waiting place has to be like that at all. In fact, I think another book can help us out here when we are stuck in the waiting place, as the bible is absolutely filled with heroes who had to wait too. Sometimes they waited patiently, and sometimes they did not, but their waiting was not devoid of hope, it was quite the opposite.  They were absolutely waiting on the Lord, and I think that makes all the difference in this game of life.

When waiting on the Lord, It is impossible to say what the outcome of the wait will be, because the outcome does not rely on you.  This is the hardest part for me personally. I generally have to exhaust every step of impatience, of thinking through ways to move the ball ahead, of plans B, C, and D, and to wait for when my mind finally gives up on all its striving to surrender to the wait.  It is an act of extreme faith for me. The embracing of the wait leaves you open. It allows God to move. It is the pause for the other person in the conversation to answer.  This week I tried to practice waiting, and I did listen and hear.  Not just the name of my bread recipient, but other truths too.  I am hoping to get better at this radical act because, I am learning, there is beauty in the wait.