bon voyage (part 3)

(Read part 1 and part 2 here.)

lessons from the bus
life revolves around waiting 

“Wait on the Lord; Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; Wait, I say, on the Lord!” Ps. 27:14

When I hear the word "wait", and half a dozen Bible verses come to mind along with a dozen Bible stories.

It was a word I heard often growing up in regards to vacation, holidays, visitors coming, getting some desired item, learning to drive, etc. It is now a word I say over and over to my 2 1/2 year old son.

And yet, I find it incredibly hard to follow the command myself. In the Western culture of get-it-now, it is increasingly hard to comprehend this small word. Not only are we, as adults, given little reason to practice waiting, but we are encouraged to meet every need and desire of our children, almost to the point of removing the lesson of waiting.

One day recently, needing to run several errands down town before lunch time, our Western cultural mindset about waiting had a head-on collision with the cultural mindset where we serve as missionaries. My husband and I headed out to find a bus. We decided to go to a different bus stop than our usual because we'd discovered that this new bus would get us downtown without all the traffic problems of our regular route.

Proud of our new knowledge, we sat down at the bus stop to wait. And wait we did. No one else on the street was waiting for the bus. We watched up and down the street for the bus, but there was none to be seen. It seemed that when we did not need the bus, it was on this street, and now we needed it and it was missing in action.

My husband finally said to me, “It is a whole different mentality here isn’t it? For most of the people here, there is no jumping in your car and getting stuff done on your time frame. Life revolves around waiting…”

Life revolves around waiting. Isn’t this one of the many themes in the Bible? 

God wants our life to revolve around waiting on Him. When we wait, we have to let go of our time frame and our priorities, and just chill out.
Wait, watch, enjoy the process.
Life is a journey.
Today is not my destination.
God’s desires for me are my destination.
Now is the journey, and that means now is the time to develop the art of waiting on God.

Amazingly enough, about the same time as our bus adventure, we received a book entitled “Waiting on God” by Andrew Murray. What a blessing this book has been to me! The author bases each chapter off of a Bible verse that relates to waiting. How easy it is to wait on God and how hard I makes it sometimes! Yet, God sends rain in the right season and He causes all things to grow.

I am thankful for a convoluted bus system and a language barrier to remind me to wait on God, connect with my community, and open my arms to one more.

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