The lessons of waiting

Yesterday, my daughter, who is sixteen, expressed her frustration that it seemed that she seemed to be waiting for everything. Waiting to get the braces off her teeth, waiting to get her license, waiting to get her grade in geometry up, waiting for a particular boy she knows to grow up (ie., man up). I can remember being that age and feeling like everything seemed to take forever. But I also remember that in the back of my mind I thought this waiting phase was only temporary, part of being a teen and not a full-fledged adult yet. But I was wrong about that, all of life is about waiting for something. I explained: You wait to get accepted into college, wait to finally get out of your parents house, wait to graduate, wait to get into grad school, wait to start, wait to graduate, wait to get a job interview, wait to get hired, wait to meet the "right" guy, wait to get engaged, wait to get married, wait to get pregnant, wait for the birth, . . . . and the waiting goes on and on. Of course these are just some of the major milestones, at least the ones that reflected my own life experience - hers could be very different, but she got the picture.

This is not the end of the story I pointed out. After a while you realize two things. First, that the waiting part can be part of the fun of life as well as an exercise in practicing patience. There is something exciting about waiting - if what you're waiting for is something you really want, like those milestones. The patience part become useful when you're waiting for something you don't want - like certain diagnosis, or in other matters for which waiting is a form of torture. Learning to wait well is part of a life lived well. The second thing is that sometimes, when what you've been waiting for finally comes to fruition, you wonder, "So this is it?" Getting what you want can, on occasion, fall into the category of, "Be careful what you pray for." Just enjoy all of your life, the waiting and the milestones, the big things and all the little ones; enjoy it all and appreciate the richness of it all, I told her.

But there is one kind of waiting, that I did not tell her about; the kind of waiting people sometimes do in their later years. The kind of waiting I have felt or heard from some very old or very sick people I've known. One man I recall from many years ago, would tell me that at age 92 he had outlived all three of his children (which no one should ever have to do), his body was shot, and he was simply tired of living. He couldn't understand why he kept waking up every morning when each night he prayed he wouldn't. He was waiting to die. One morning though he didn't wake up. And I'm sure that in the end, what he found waiting for him, was worth the wait.

In the congregation I serve there are many of us who have parents who are now in their latter years; some of whom are experiencing this sense of profound waiting. I think of my father, who is so much like the one I mentioned above. He too, having outlived one of his kids, and is now in hospice, waits for death. There's no way to downplay this in order to make it more palatable. This is not part of the fun of living; nor should it be sentimentalized in any form as such. There is a reason there are no Hallmark cards for such occasions. But it is a time in which how well we learned to be patient can influence not only how we perceive this time-standing-still, but how it is experienced by those waiting with us.

So my hope for my children as they are starting out on their long journeys of waiting and experiencing, is that they learn to wait gracefully; that is, that they find ways for wisdom and peace to replace impatience. There's always time to get there, sometimes more or less than we would want, but ultimately we choose how to spend it, suffer it, or savor it.