Stages of 'Waiting.'

Have you given much thought to 'waiting?' Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Regardless, you and me and everybody has done a bunch of waiting in our life's journey. There is the mindless mundane waiting at stop lights, grocery lines and that ever slow descending elevator. We recall our childhood's eager waiting for Santa, birthdays and summer vacations from school. We begin getting that taste of adult kinds of waiting as we anticipate our driver's license and that passage-rights threshold of age twenty-one. Much of those teen waiting moments were in anticipation of fun with friends or that time to be with your sweetheart, all of which was carefree waiting.

The adult waiting experience became less carefree than childhood and teen years' waiting. There seem to be a greater frequency of anxious waiting. Waiting for the telephone to ring when a voice on the other end might tell you that "the job is yours." The mixed emotional excitement of the birth of a child. At that same birth-waiting one has the anxiousness of mother and baby's health and well-being upon and after delivery. Soon the parents come to understand that children bring forth their greatest joys and equally their greatest fears.

While parents are vacillating between the waiting joys and anxieties with their children, they are often introduced to a much different, vigil type waiting. A parent undergoes surgery or faces medical tests and or treatments while we wait for good news and good outcomes. There seems to be no time in our journey when times moves more at a snail's pace as it does regarding personal and family health issues.

Of course, we tell ourselves that our lack of patience when waiting causes us to miss Blessings and patience is a vital part of trusting God. Yet as often as we tell ourselves to let go and let God, we somehow seem to be in the grips of a thought that should we not be anxious and not worry, we perhaps are failing to do our part and thus lack caring.