The Waiting Room

The waiting room…the place where the proverbial rubber meets the road.  If you haven’t spent hours in one, you will sometime in the future.

Time seems suspended there.

Sometimes you keep checking the clock every five minutes to little avail.

Sometimes you realize it is already hours later and you haven’t eaten, slept or bathed. Minutes or hours or days seem to meld together into a surreal blob.

Sometimes you don’t know if the sun is shining or clouds fill the sky. Fluorescent lights confuse our senses.  Day or night are indistinguishable.

Sometimes it is not a physical room.  Unanswered prayers, the dreaded phone call of results, the slow progression of a disease, watching a loved one make disastrous choices over and over again play out in a waiting season.

Sometimes we have to wait for justice or forgiveness of vindication. It’s HARD. So very HARD…

Everything you have ever depended upon is challenged by your time in the waiting room.

It’s hard to wait.  I am not by human nature patient.  I am a fixer; a doer. I need to take control of a situation and feel like “I am doing something “.  Ok…I am a control freak. It’s one of the hardest emotions for me to work through as a human.  In fact, I know I am incapable of working through it without divine intervention.

Waiting is God’s territory and HE can lead me through those uncharted grounds.  He knows waiting.  He is a patient, loving God since the beginning of creation.  For over 5,000  years, he has patiently chased his people time after time and pleaded with them to return to him. He sacrificed his greatest gift: the Messiah, the Chosen One, Emmanuel, Yeshua, his SON to bring us home to him. Second Peter 3:9 tells us,  The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

Waiting has a purpose, God’s purpose.  My precious mother-in-law once told me she had prayed for something FORTY years and it had not happened.  Wow, I struggle after a week or two if I am honest.  Humbling in fact…

The writer of Lamentations may have given us the key to waiting.  Our souls seek him.  When our souls seek him, HE is our refuge in the waiting room. Nothing else will suffice but being held in the bosom of our GOD who knit us together.

The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
    to the soul who seeks him.  Lamentations 3:25

And we look forward to the day where all things will be made right again.  We will never have to wait again because time is no more and we are safely home.  Maranatha!

#shelteredingrace