Waiting

I'm rather an impatient person and have a streak of impulsiveness in me. That's not such a good admission to make. Though God's been working on me over the years. 

One of the biggest things we've had to wait for was permission to come to Japan as missionaries. That story involved nearly three years of waiting. Though I know people wait far longer than that for things, but in the midst, it felt like a very long time, especially when we didn't know the end result. During that period our eldest son was born and we had the uncertainty of David quitting his regular employment so that we could focus on preparing for Japan. 

What held back our permission was a lack of promised finance. But I think that God was preparing our hearts too. If he'd allowed us to go to Japan quickly, we wouldn't have learnt to rely on him quite so much. And we therefore would have struggled more in those early years in Japan when it was really hard to be here. In the waiting and the leaning on God, we got confirmation that this is truly where he wants us. We also gained spiritual "muscle". Nothing like having to trust in the midst of big uncertainty to develop that.

What we're particularly waiting on now is answers about what our son will be studying next year. I guess our expectations have changed. When we were students, it was just accepted that you didn't know your tertiary entrance score until nearly Christmas and then you didn't know what you got accepted into until mid-January, only about five weeks before university started. 

I look at it now and am a bit shocked at how little time there is between finding out what you're accepted into and when you start. But that is only because we've been living in an environment where our son's classmates knew a long time before graduation where they'd be going to college (conditional on good results, though I'm not sure how this works). I guess it is also a factor of our lifestyle that makes that shortness of time shocking. We can't just drive down the road to the uni, we've got to book flights . . . thankfully he's applied to universities all in the same area and our best guess is that he'll get into one of the courses there. We also tend to be planners. We like to plan things out a fair way ahead of time, especially big things, so that makes the unknownness of this a little challenging. Though it's not really that big a deal. We're going ahead planning anyway—even though we don't know the details of what—we at least know when and where (i.e. Brisbane) and accomodation has been sorted.

Soon we'll head into the pre-home assignment wait too. When we're looking at finding accommodation and transport for our months in Brisbane. More waiting. More leaning into God. (Here's another post I wrote about waiting and it's value.)

But big or small waiting (waiting for news about holiday accomodation that you want to book can be hard)—it's challenging and an opportunity to grow.

I was sparked to write about waiting by a post I saw on Velvet Ashes called High Speed Waiting. I do recommend you go and take a peek at it. It's much nicer writing than mine has been today.