Waiting

The clock's ticking and nothing is changing.

This isn't my timetable, God.

But maybe that's the point.

The past several months of my life have been full of waiting - waiting on college admissions, waiting on friends, waiting on the right medication. Waiting. It's not fun.

Right now, I'm waiting for five universities to release their acceptance letters in the next two weeks. (I plan to have the ice cream and chocolate stocked and ready.) When I submitted those applications a few months ago, I spread my life before a group of strangers - my grades, how I spend my time outside of school, my dreams for the future, what my teachers think of me. I willingly invited these unknown admissions counselors to analyze each detail of my life, evaluate it, and decide whether I make the cut or not. Seriously, it feels a bit like being a daddy longlegs crawling across a stark white wall, readily visible and easily squashable.

Sure, the results will be what they will be, but the anticipation is a killer. If I could have it my way, I would have gotten the decision back the day I submitted the application. Over the course of my long eighteen years of experience, though, I've made an earth-shattering discovery: I can't snap my fingers like Mary Poppins and instantly put my life in order. It doesn't work. (Believe me, I've tried.) I don't control time.

But maybe that's the point.

Time - that dimension, that concept, that something that binds us. Lately, the bizarre idea of time flashes through my thoughts frequently. It's such an arbitrary thing, really.  Time. Our entire lives play out on this field of time that restricts us far more than gravity or any such "law of the universe" that we take for granted as an absolute. If I were controlling my life, my wishes would all become realities, and they would happen instantaneously. I would have what I wanted when I wanted it.

Guess what? I don't have that power... because I'm not in control.

But maybe that's the point.

Waiting forces me to recognize that the world doesn't run on my clock. When I'm waiting for things I want, the pretense of power is up. If I'm waiting for something, it is only because I am not capable of making it happen. Not that it won't happen. Just that I can't make it happen. I'm not in control.

If I'm not, who is?

The Person who controls time. The Person who lives outside of time. The Person who, for some reason unknown to me, created time as the framework in which I was to live.

And time might exist for exactly this reason: to teach me that I'm not in control and I don't have to be. To teach me to trust the One who is.

My whole life tells this story of my hands gripping tightly, trying unlawfully to wrest power from God, and Him slowly opening my hands to take that power back. So that I don't drown in this sinking ship. So that I can live in the fullness for which I was created. So that I can trust Him, know Him, and let His nearness be my good.

The waiting becomes a blessing.

When I started high school, He knew who my friends would be today. Six months ago, He saw each day that I would drag my body around in frustrated exhaustion. Today, He knows what schools will accept me and where I will choose to go. My life is spread before Him like a tapestry, a story that He sees fully from outside the bounds of time. I am living right against the strands of thread, and I am so small that a single strand can seem to overwhelm my whole world. God sees and knows that there is more. For now, I must simply trust Him that the tapestry is good.

In these moments of waiting, my fists slowly start to unclench. Sometimes focusing on the next big thing feels like the only option, and it seems impossible to think of anything else. It's not. God has called me to the here and now, to make the most of each moment, starting with the present. The "big things" that can overwhelm me don't disappear, but as my hands open, this joyful peace washes through me. Sometimes, I can even see a broader view of the tapestry.

And what I find there is that the whole of the tapestry declares the very same truth I have discovered up close to the thread: God is sovereign, and His goodness never fails. In that comfort, I will rest. Breathe. Wait.