Wait and See Teaser

I am SOOOO excited to give you a sneak peek…a teaser of Wait and See: Finding Peace In God’s Pauses and Plans.

Learning to Wait and See

A teacher. A wife. A mother. My little-girl heart dreamed of being all of these one day.

With chalk in hand and glasses resting on my nose, I practiced being a teacher with my stuffed animals. Carol Brady of The Brady Bunch taught me all I needed to know about being a wife. Caring for my dolls, as well as my years of babysitting, prepared me for motherhood. When I graduated from high school, I was ready to put my plans in motion.

Becoming a teacher requires four years of college. Graduated. Got a job. Dream came true.

Becoming a wife requires a fella. Found and dated him for two years. Got a husband. Dream came true.

Becoming a mother requires … well, you know what it requires. No details are necessary. After two years of trying, no baby. Dream didn’t come true.

My first two dreams came to pass just as I had planned. However, after the two years of failing conceive, I wondered if I would ever sing the childhood rhyme, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Wendy with a baby carriage.” Dream number three required me to wait and see.

You need to know something about me: I have never been a wait-and-see kind of girl. Deep down, I am a hurry-up, right-now, please-and-thank-you kind of gal. The word patient does not describe me—ask anyone who knows and loves me. So you can imagine how well I handled waiting to see my dream of motherhood come true. Waiting dominated my thoughts as it does for most of us when we’re waiting for the fulfillment of our hopes and dreams.

And you? Do you feel the tug of waiting for something but are scared to let yourself dream it will happen? Maybe you are waiting on a miracle. We have all been there—sometimes more often than we prefer. And the miracle requires something of us—waiting.

Timing Really Is Everything

The desire to be a mother consumed me and my thoughts. Why can’t I get pregnant? What is wrong with me? What have I done to warrant such punishment from God? It seemed my girlfriends were getting pregnant with ease. That just didn’t seem fair, so I determined that God wasn’t fair.

I began to decline invitations to the multitude of blue-and-pink parties. My husband and I purposely socialized with friends who were not expecting or didn’t have children. However, avoiding pregnant friends did not ease my pain or subdue my longing.

What have I done to warrant such punishment from God?

Trying harder didn’t help either. For two years, I ingested fertility pills, endured monthly injections, scheduled intimacy, and charted my basal body thermometer readings every morning at six o’clock. There wasn’t a specialist or a test that could explain why I was unable to conceive.

Medically, I was doing everything right; spiritually, I was not. The wait exhausted my faith.

I resolved that God was mad at me, so I resolved to be mad at Him in return. Maybe you can relate? You still go to church on Sunday but have nothing to do with God on the other days ending in y. We have our plans and want our way. When things don’t happen accordingly, we retaliate by ignoring God. I felt this way for over two years as the object of my wait became greater than the Person of my faith.

The Wait and See

Eventually, I did conceive.

Had my faith matured and had I patiently waited for God’s plan to unfold? Had I accepted a potentially childless future with grace? That would be a great big resounding no! I’d love to say I learned to trust God more, regularly devoured what I was learning in Bible study, and served others during the wait. Unfortunately, none of these are even close to the truth. When I became pregnant with my daughter, I was far from God and indifferent toward Him. His attempts to communicate with me through whispers from Scripture and the sensing of His Spirit during worship songs at church were ignored. It is safe to say I wasn’t on speaking terms with the Lord.

It’s now been almost twenty years since that difficult season, and I’ve learned this key point: Waiting well looks forward to the future while staying present in the present. Waiting well means I remain open to God and allow Him to move me toward the future He has planned, in His time. I did not wait well.

You see, staying present in the present required me to be happy for others who were living my dream, even as I felt every ache of not having a child. Staying present meant accepting that questions would remain unanswered. Staying present should have involved me being content with the here and now and whatever the future held. But I could not bear to look forward to the future, because as far as I could see, my future was childless. And a childless future was not a future I wanted.

Waiting well looks forward to the future while staying present in the present.

It took me a few years, but eventually I learned that the conception of my daughter had occurred in God’s perfect timing. All of our “wait and see” experiences do. I envision Him running His finger across the kingdom calendar in December 1996, saying, “Yep. It’s time.” If we are willing to learn, the wait and see can be full of valuable lessons.

Maybe you are currently in a wait-and-see season that seems as though it will never end: waiting on a job, the return of a wayward child, your husband’s salvation, a man to marry, or a job promotion. Or perhaps you have just come out of one waiting season and believe you are headed into another. Waiting is stinkin’ hard. In the wait and see, it is imperative that we pause to consider the possibilities of God’s design. From the depths of our ache, can we dare say to Him, “Show me what You have planned. I am willing to wait”?

When we ask God to show us His plan, we begin to align our heart with His heart. The door opens to experience God in deeper, more real ways. We still wait, but we deepen our knowledge of His character and goodness. We learn to trust that God acts on behalf of those who are willing to wait and see (Isa. 64:4) and that He does immeasurably more than we can think or imagine (Eph. 3:20). As we wait, we find peace in God’s plans and hope in His pauses. Our focus moves from the object of our wait to the Person of our faith.

Here’s the link to pre-order Wait and See. Won’t you join me on the journey?