What do you think of when you hear the word “please wait”?

It is positive? Like a happy pause in an otherwise hectic day to just sit quietly and reflect?

Or are you like me, and when you hear those words, be it on an automated phone line, at the window at the Social Security office (was there last week – yikes), or at a crowded eatery on a Saturday night, you go into a mini panic.

PLEASE WAIT? For how long? Are we talking five minutes or twenty? Can you be a little more specific? Because I want to know if the wait will be worth it. Will the food be THAT good? Will the customer service associate I’m waiting on be EXCELLENT at their job and I’ll get all my questions answered? Will the wait BE WORTH IT.

And it can feel a little like this scene from Bettlejuice:

Yikes. No good. And I still can’t believe they forgot their handbook.

I’m in a waiting period right now, and it’s tough.

I have faith and I know that God has a plan. But it can feel scary and more than a little discouraging.

But instead of despairing, I’m working hard on staying in the moment I’m in, doing whatever I can to move forward, and putting my faith in things I can’t see, but in a God who I can experience and who knows exactly where I am.

And he knows exactly where you, are, too. So let’s, together, make our waiting feel more like this:

This is a picture of Amelia Pond, a character from Dr. Who, for those of you who haven’t discovered it’s greatness yet. Amelia was waiting for The Doctor to take her on amazing adventures. And he did just that. But first, she had to wait.

Love this from her final episode on the show (she had died by then and was writing this to the doctor in another space time continuum but let’s not worry about that now . . .):

There’s a little girl waiting in a garden. She’s going to wait a long while, so she’s going to need a lot of hope. Go to her. Tell her a story. Tell her that if she’s patient, the days are coming that she’ll never forget. Tell her she’ll go to see and fight pirates. She’ll fall in love with a man who’ll wait two thousand years to keep her safe. Tell her she’ll give hope to the greatest painter who ever lived. And save a whale in outer space. Tell her, this is the story of Amelia Pond. And this is how it ends.

Outside of Dr. Who context, this may seem like a ridiculous paragraph and I’m OK with that because if it makes a great deal of sense to me. Maybe, at the very least, you can relate this to changing your waiting from a dreaded awfulness to an anticipating joy.

And there are oh so many stories waiting for you and me. God has excitement, and challenge, and adventure and hope and joy. We can’t see it just now. But the days are coming.

Just you wait.

Happy waiting

Jen