Lately, I feel like all I have been doing is waiting. And guess what? I hate it! I didn't realize how hard it is to wait. We are so used to living a society where we get everything as soon as we want. The IPhone is the perfect example. We can have internet at any time we want, our pictures, our music, etc, etc. we have e-mail that sends messages in a matter of second. Snail mail is only for bills. Just last week, we were sending letters to each other. There were people who didn't know how to correctly put their address on the envelope, and I don't blame them. Snail mail is becoming an obsolete means of communication because people hate waiting. My pastor said this week that he thinks that Patience is one the most difficult Fruit of the Spirit because it is something you have to learn. I agree with him. The other Fruit of the Spirit come more naturally than Patience. Patience is something we have to learn and learning usually involves being challenged. Some people just have patience. Others like me must learn it. And it can be hard.

But at the same time, waiting can be good. It gives us time to think. Is what we are waiting for, really worth waiting for? After we get what we are waiting for, what's next? What if what we were waiting for wasn't exactly what we expected? or what if it is everything we expected and more? Then what?

I think a good story about waiting is Abraham's story. Abraham and Sarah wanted children. God promised them children but they had to wait a really long time. At one point, they get desperate. They get tired of waiting. So Sarah tells Abraham to sleep with Hagar, their servant. This was actually a common practice back in the day, since women were looked down upon when they had no children. Abraham slept with Hagar and she became pregnant. She had Ishmael, who wasn't necessarily part of God's original plan. Ishmael reprensents Sarah and Abraham's mistake and impatience. They had to wait some more and trust God's promise and they did finally get their own son, Isaac.

The problem with waiting is that once we become impatient and we get tired of waiting. We forget to trust God. We rather get our answer NOW! So, as human beings, we decide to take things in our hands and then we screw things up. I think maybe one of the reasons we don't like waiting is that waiting requires us trusting God to take care of things. It requires us to take leaps of faith. I know that leaps of faith are hard to take, when God isn't somebody we can see physically.

There is a beauty in waiting. When we can calmly and patiently wait, we trust God to handle whatever is going on. If its college applications, relationships, job interviews, tests, problems, worries, doubts. I know that I am not done waiting, nowhere near done, and I am still going to get impatient. I am going to want to take things in my own hands. I know that waiting isn't going to get any easier. But I also know that I have a loving, caring God that is going to help me wait and challenge me so that I may learn patience. I guess it all comes down to waiting for that too.