"The Waiting Room"

The last few days I have spent a lot of time in waiting rooms. Where your loved one is, while you wait in the waiting room, much is being done…medical staff is prepping and doctors are working, but from where you sit in the waiting room you can see none of that. All you can see is the clock’s hands moving painlessly slow. In the waiting room there is nothing you can do for the one you love. You can pray, but by this point all the words you can think to say have already been sent up to God. No, the waiting room is appropriately named because all you can do is wait.

I am no fan of waiting rooms…I am much better at doing than waiting. I am less likely to stop and smell the roses than I am to plant, prune and weed the roses. However, life seems to not care what my personality type prefers. At times, life forces us all to take a seat in the waiting room. Sometimes life forces us to sit in an actual doctor’s office waiting room…waiting to see how things go for one we love or waiting to hear from a doctor what the tests revealed…there we all hope for the best as we fight not to think of the worst. Sometimes life puts in a waiting room that we cannot see, but certainly can feel…waiting for someone to at least acknowledge they received your résumé as you wait in the unemployment line…waiting for your child to see that you don’t exist to make them miserable, but your rules are out of love…waiting for that someone to show up in your life to move you from being alone to being with someone who wants to be with you…waiting to see God answer prayer…waiting for answers, waiting for help, waiting for direction, just waiting…

The waiting room is not an easy place to sit because the rules of the room are clear…in the waiting room the one thing you are suppose to do is wait. Don’t act, don’t think, don’t worry, don’t try to fix anything...just wait…wait in the waiting room and you have done your job. Are you willing to receive that assignment from God? Isaiah 40:31 says, “Those who wait upon the Lord renew their strength; they mount up with wings as eagles...they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Waiting on God is not a waste of time; it is the best use of time. Because the more I learn to wait in the waiting rooms of life, the less I will interrupt what God is doing that I cannot see.

For instance, if you were in a hospital waiting room and grew so impatient that you barged into the surgery room, you would delay if not prevent the surgeon from doing his job. The same applies in our relationship with God. When God tells us to wait, he asks us to trust that he is working even when we cannot see it. If we will be still and wait upon the Lord, eventually we will see God’s work come to completion. But if we jump out of our seat and barge in and try to do what we cannot, could we delay or possibly even prevent God from working? I don’t know, but by his grace, I am learning the very hard lesson of simply staying in my seat and waiting when I find myself in the waiting room.