On Waiting
Scrolling through Instagram the other day, I saw the following quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “How much of life is lost in waiting.” In a purely mathematical sense, it makes sense. I’ve spent years and decades of life waiting for things - from two minutes I have to wait every morning for my cup of coffee to finish brewing, to the three in a half decades I waited for a child, to the years of waiting ahead of me as I long for heaven and the relationships that will be restored there. If I added up all that time, it would be several lifetimes and more “wasted” on waiting.
Yet, for some reason, waiting seems not only to be an essential part of life but also seems to be God’s favorite. The Bible is full of people who waited - for children, for justice, for the Messiah. And I kind of refuse to believe that all that waiting means nothing.
It goes back to Growth Mindset, maybe - that the journey is just as important as (or even more so than) what it produces. That there is something holy about the process, and there is more happening while we wait than we could ever hope or dream. That nothing that happens to us, no matter how small or how stupid it seems at the time, is wasted. It’s like weaving a tapestry, where every thread is equally as important to the end product, the making of something beautiful.
Not that the process isn’t hard or painful. It often is. I think Gerard Manley Hopkins put it best in the poem below, both the aching and the hope of waiting for what the aching is working out:
Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,
But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks
Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;
To do without, take tosses, and obey.
Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,
Nowhere. Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks
Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks
Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.
We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills
To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills
Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.
And where is he who more and more distils
Delicious kindness?—He is patient. Patience fills
His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.