You Want Me to Do What?

Wait.

What do you do when you are waiting? Daydream? Check email? Twitch?

Do you find yourself wishing away the time? I do.

Have you ever tried to find the messages in your wait time? Is it because you’re supposed to see something or find something you were looking for or hear something you wouldn’t have heard otherwise?

These are the gifts God gives us, according to writer/columnist Eileen Button, author of “The Waiting Place Learning to Appreciate Life’s Little Delays” (Thomas Nelson, 978-0849946257, June 7, 2011).

This new book helps give you comfort in the waiting times – waiting for the day to end, a child to heal, a husband’s return, a loved one to die. “To wait is human, to find life in The Waiting Place, divine,” writes Button.

A collection of 22 essays help us deal with the times in life when we find ourselves waiting – in traffic, at the doctor, in the grocery line. We also wait for the big things – to fall in love, for our children to grow up or some of us may be waiting to die ourselves.

“Sometimes relationships are built, faith is discovered, dreams are (slowly) realized, and our hearts are expanded,” according to the book. When we take time to find the gifts we get in the waiting, life gets so much easier.

Button tells Family First a sweet story of her own waiting place. She was looking forward to having a few moments to sit down and relax when her then 10-year-old daughter asked her to come outside and fly a kite with her. Button says she told herself to “peel her rear” out of the chair and go out there.

After a few moments of kite flying, her child turned to her and said “Thank you so much. This is awesome. It’s like fishing in Heaven.”  Button realized that time she would have spent inside doing nothing was nothing compared to this experience with her daughter.  “That’s what I would have missed,” she tells me.

“Lean into the waiting place, the chaos,” says Button. Stop trying to escape this through your television, cell phone or social media.

When her younger son was born with birth defects, she remembers sitting in the hospital room trying to “press his face’s image into my brain” because she knew her time might be limited with him. Instead of wishing away the time for him to heal, she spent the time making the most of the moments with him. She calls him her “living miracle” now.

She says it was hard for her to understand the others in the hospital who sat in the waiting room, watching television instead of spending those precious moments with their ailing children.

Her older son is only two years away from college. Instead of wishing him off on his own, Button says she tries so hard to enjoy every day with him, every moment.

What a wonderful message for all of us (including our children, who rarely have to wait for anything) – waiting is a gift, not a curse. There’s a reason the traffic is bad, the call doesn’t come, the time passes slowly.

Embrace it. Savor it. Live it. Love it.

You’ll be so happy you did. You’ll find your real life there.

Please check out more about Eileen on her website at www.eileenbutton.com.

Marijo Tinlin is the editor in chief of Family First, one of the oldest family-oriented websites on the internet. She is also the author of the new book “How to Raise an American Patriot, Making it Okay for Our Kids to Be Proud to Be American” available at www.raisinganamericanpatriot.com.