Waiting!

Waiting. Who likes to wait? No one (and certainly not me!). At Christmas this year, our annual letter was all about waiting, and how God works and moves and uses our waiting periods. It seemed like nearly every person involved in the Christmas story was waiting--from Mary and Joseph to the shepherds to the wise men to Simeon and Anna to the angels. And aren't we all called to wait?

But the last few days, God has been teaching us a bit more about waiting (and about my own sinfulness!). This is one of those blogs I hope and assume no one will read, but here goes! We have been waiting to hear if our son would get into a particular college yesterday (Jan. 31st). He got all the necessary paperwork in by the early november deadline so it's been almost 3 months of waiting since that time. The date to let everyone know online would be Jan. 31st.

So, starting shortly after midnight, we kept checking the website to see the results. Early the next morning, we kept checking. Every single one of his friends, except one, had heard by that morning (and most with good results). We kept checking, but the website continued to indicate that it was not yet available. Apparently, the website had some kind of malfunction and a small number of students could not yet get their results. So we waited and kept checking.

By the evening, the website malfunction had been cleared up, but there were still 150 students who had still not been reviewed yet. They would be reviewing these last students and let us know in the next couple of days. So we continued to wait.

So here's the confession part: I handled it pretty well until late yesterday afternoon. Then I started to feel pretty frustrated and discouraged, thinking, "why does this kind of thing always seem to happen to us?" "We have waited so long and I'm sick to death of waiting and just want to know something!" I was just generally in a grumpy, self-pitying mood and even got irritated with our dog for taking too long sniffing every blessed tree on our walk!

Of course, I am so thankful that My Lord does not let us stew in our sin and sinful attitudes. As I sat in the bathtub last night, He suddenly brought vividly to my mind the tragic sight of that poor father sharing brokenly about his daughter who had not yet been found in the rubble of Haiti. She had gone with a mission group from her school, and they had initially been told she had been found and had survived. They joyfully flew down to Florida to go meet her, but when they arrived, they were told the first report was incorrect, and they have still not found her. So they wait tearfully.

O Lord Jesus, I wept, forgive me selfishness and shallowness and sinful attitude. Boy, I really flunked that test of waiting. How quickly self-pity and pride and selfishness can swallow us whole if we are not on our guard. What a terrible, sickening sight it is to see how full of sin this heart can be.

But as I've shared so many times before, like John Newton, I cry out: how great a sinner I am and how great a Savior I have! What kind of God would take a spoiled, self-preoccupied, prideful sinner like me and offer complete and total forgiveness and a new start? As the song says, "there is no God like our God!" Those nails should have been mine. That beating belonged to me. That humiliating nakedness and desperate thirst deserved to have been mine. That betrayal and rejection--all mine and not the perfect sinless Creator of the galaxies.

But "God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God." 2 Cor. 5:21 Because of my Savior, I can crawl up into the lap of my Abba, my Daddy, and tell him I'm so sorry and know that He loves me totally and forgives me completely. And He truly does make all things new! A God of 2nd and 3rd and 4th chances--unbelievable... but true! We can never fall so greatly or fail so miserably that His grace and love and mercy are not deeper and greater still.

So we are still waiting, but now we wait with joy and peace and patience. Because we are waiting with our Heavenly Father who has forgiven us and redeemed us and filled us. And after all, He's in charge of it all, from the tiniest microscopic cell to the largest galaxy--so what do we have to fear wherever we are waiting? No medical prognosis or relationship struggle or financial strain or seemingly hopeless situation is beyond His promise to use "all things" for His glory and our greater good. And so we wait and declare joyfully, to God be all the glory!