Waiting! Yep I said waiting. I’m learning that when you surrender, usually (if not always) you enter into a time of waiting, sometimes just for a second to listen to God for the next step and other times for years while God builds you up and orchestrates what he has planned for you. I have been working on surrendering two main things in my life (I’m working on surrendering my whole life of course, but I’m having problems with these tow issues!) and I have been praying for God to just direct me one way or another. Lately all I’ve heard is silence! At first I was like, “what the heck God?? I’m trying to listen, but you aren’t helping!” Yesterday I realized that I haven’t been listening for a real answer, but for the answer I wanted to hear. The answer that God is giving me is to wait…crap! I want to share with you some of my struggles that I am having with waiting. Please bare with me as I open up, I am hoping that God can use my struggles to help others who are going through similar stuff.
My husband and I bought a town home when we got married (almost 4yrs ago) and thought that it was a perfect move for us. Now looking back I can see that this was another time that God was asking us to wait and we (more me) decided to go on our own and do it anyways. Now I hate this house. I know strong words, but really the only things I like about the house are the things we added to it like the paint colors, the furniture, and hopefully soon the bathroom remodel. Everything else I strongly dislike. In January we got broken into, thankfully nothing was stolen but I began to fear being alone in the house. In February our car got broken into and I said, “that’s it, we are moving no matter what”, I didn’t pray about I just made that decision and my husband agreed. The next 8 months we practically killed ourselves (and our bank account) to get out until finally we had no choice but to give up when two of my closest friends needed our help. For the two weeks that we took off, we felt like a huge weight had been taken off of our shoulders. I realized that for the first time I had really prayed to God about the situation. The funny thing is that my husband did the same thing but we never talked about it until this week. Now that I am looking at the situation through God’s eyes I can see that we would have been way in the negative if we continued to go down the path we were going. Right now we have a very low mortgage and are able to work on our debt. But if we “upgraded” like I wanted we would be worse off because we couldn’t pay off our debt in the very near future. Sure we would have a nice house, but overall we would not be happy. Something I also noticed is that we always blame our horrible house for a lot of our problems. I blame the fact that I don’t cook a lot on the fact that our kitchen doesn’t connect to our living room and I cant watch Jacob and cook at the same time, that we cant get stuff done (like laundry) while Jacob is awake because we can’t find a good gate for the stairs, etc. Also, our house has a bad floor plan, meaning that nothing flows and there are a lot of “dead ends”. These dead ends tend to collect junk because we don’t use the space, even though we need it. My husband and I use the excuse that if we had a better house it wouldn’t constantly look like a hurricane came through. I should know this is not true. The real problem is that my husband and I are extremely undisciplined when it comes to keeping a house tidy. We will talk about this in another post. Last night we decided that we will stop using this excuse and make the entire house “usable”. Also we will stop procrastinating on upgrades thinking that we will be moving soon. Strangely enough I feel a freedom in all this. I’m not happy with the house, or the fact that we don’t have a real backyard (yet another problem with the house), but I am happy that we are following what God has for us and that it makes Him happy. We know that God has something better for us, it’s just not time yet.
The other issue that I have been trying to surrender is not so easy. We have been trying for another baby since April. When we were trying for Jacob, it took us 9 months to get pregnant. Most of that time I prayed and pleaded with God to give us a child. I found out I had some medical issues that could hurt our chances of having kids, which of course made waiting even harder. I look back now and I am so glad that God made us wait. After about 6 months of trying I realized that the headaches that I had been having for about a year and a half were getting worse. These headaches were so bad that I was beginning to get blurriness in my right eye. This all happened right as we were working with a fertility specialist to see what the “plan” was. I thank God that I was not pregnant through this time. My headaches required some tests that would have been pretty dangerous if I had been pregnant and even the medicine that I had to take was pretty dangerous to a growing baby. Thankfully I found an awesome neurologist that took care of me and we controlled the issue to where it was safe to try again. I remember then that it was so easy to surrender it all to God and just believe that he had a reason. Not soon after (actually that month) I found out that I was preggo with my sweet Jacob. This time it is so hard to just surrender and wait. I’ve always had this dream of my kids being really close in age and that dream is slowly drifting away with every month that passes. Also, I think a lot of it is because waiting implies that you can’t do anything, your just supposed to sit and wait. Well when trying to have a baby there is a lot of doing involved (I don’t mean that to be dirty!) like charting days, paying attention to what you eat, taking vitamins, etc. I’m having a hard time remembering that I can still do all that and also “wait”. My sister reminded me in her blog yesterday, when waiting it doesn’t mean that you should just sit and do nothing, you should use this time to run to God and seek Him. Get to know Him, get to know His will. I can already tell that this period of waiting might not be for the same reason as last time but it is still very important. I can feel God pulling me toward Him, I suddenly have this desire to jump head first into reading about His unfailing love, or I actually look forward to praying to Him and actually listening to what He has to say. Sure my heart is still aching for another baby and our home still doesn’t feel full, but I have a peace knowing that I’m not doing anything wrong, I’m not broken. God just has something better for my family and me.
I will be the first to admit that I hate waiting. I can almost be considered a hypocrite to even write about this subject because I am SO bad at waiting. My first instinct when I am told to wait it to fold my arms across my chest, stick out my bottom lip, stomp my foot and cry “I want it now!” (and if you think I am joking, ask my family!) My second instinct is to just do it so it gets done on MY timetable, even if I have to jump too high over obstacles. Both of these are so wrong! If we don’t learn to wait then we miss the good stuff that God has for us, the heart changing stuff. Also, God sees the bigger picture, the path that we are just too blind to see. You can almost compare us to a driver on a very curvy road in the mountains go way too fast. God sees every bump and roadblock. He can also see which shortcuts are safe and which ones just lead us even further off the path. Waiting means that we have to slow down and go God’s speed and trust that around the next turn He knows how to swerve the pothole. It’s not easy but so worth it. Last night I was reading my sister’s blog and she shared a quote that really helped me -“The hardest part of faith is often simply to wait. And the trouble is, if we don’t, then we start to fix the problem ourselves-and that makes it worse. We complicate the situation to the point where it takes God much longer to fix it than if we had quietly waited for His working in the first place.” (from Jim Cymbala in his book “Fresh Faith”) This really hit me hard that my need to have things now just makes the situation worse, and that in the past I have really made things harder than they had to be. Its kind of funny though because I had been praying all week for God to tell me if waiting is really the right thing to do and all I had to do was listen. Thankfully my sister let God speak through her!
So now we wait. For how long? Nobody knows but God and I’m ok with that. Sure I will have my bad days and it wont always be easy, but God is molding my heart from an impatient heart to a patient one. I’m excited to see how great God will bless us and who I will become after the waiting is over.
Here is a song that reminds to be faithful through waiting
Faithful by Brooke Fraser
There's distance in the air and I cannot make it leave
i wave my arms' round about me and blow with all my might
I cannot sense you close, though I know you're always here
But the comfort of you near is what i long for
When I can't feel you, I have learned to reach out just the same
When I can't hear you, I know you still hear everyword I pray
And i want you more than i want to live another day
And as I wait for you maybe I'm made more faithful
All the folly of the past, though I know it is undone
i still feel the guilty one, still trying to make it right
So i whisper soft your name, let it roll around my tounge,
knowing you're the only one who knows me
You know me
When I can't feel you, I have learned to reach out just the same
When I can't hear you, I know you still hear everyword I pray
And i want you more than i want to live another day
And as I wait for you maybe I'm made more faithful
Show me how I should live this
Show me where I should walk
I count this world as loss to me
You are all I want
You are all I want
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