God's Time
“Patience
is not simply the ability to wait—it's about how you wait, or your
attitude while waiting.”
Joyce
Meyer
We humans do a lot of
waiting. In fact, our language is replete with idioms about waiting:
All good things come to those who wait. Lay in wait. Time and tide
wait for no man. Wait for the other shoe to drop. Wait and see
attitude. Anything worth having is worth waiting for. Hurry up and
wait. You get the point, right? We wait a lot.
Some of us have a better
attitude about waiting than others. Because I am “high strung” I
tend to be impatient. I don't like to wait for things to happen. I
wonder about you—are you a good waiter? In the past, impatience has
gotten me into a lot of trouble. I pushed and pushed, and if I found
myself still waiting, I blew sky high. Not a good attitude if you
actually want to get things done. People on the receiving end of a
blow-up react badly to it—usually by slowing down even more.
For the next few weeks, I
will do a great deal of waiting. A friend is going into the hospital
for a procedure that will require a two-three week stay. I am on his
care team, so I will be sitting in a hospital room a lot for a few
weeks. I have to tell you, I've spent many days in hospital rooms,
and there's nothing about it that I enjoy. I wonder if you feel the
same. Time creeps like a snail. Sometimes it seems to stop
completely. So I am trying to adjust my attitude before hand, so that
when we get into the thick of it, I can simply be present to my
friend and do what needs to be done.
As we know, there are two
kinds of time—chronos and kairos. Clock time and what is sometimes
called God's time. Kairos means the opportune moment, the perfect
time. It is measured not in minutes, but in moments. When we have to
wait, if we can slip the bonds of chronos, and allow kairos to be our
reality, we can make a good thing out of something uncomfortable.
That's the attitude adjustment Joyce Meyer speaks of in the quote
above. Waiting with expectation of something positive, rather than
impatiently counting off the minutes we feel are wasted with all this
waiting. Sitting in God's time is not such a bad place to be. Perhaps
it will even teach me patience.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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