In the Waiting

This post is for my friend Laura's blog (see it here). 

I don't consider myself a patient person. Oh sure, waiting in line to check out at the store or waiting for the light to change is fine. I can handle those. But waiting for the 'next big thing', that's hard for me to do! And the way my husband and I are, we always have a something in the works. Recently we've been thrown into the 'next big thing' and the swirling chaos of a big move. But before that all happened, it felt like I was waiting for-ev-er. 

In October of 2012, we decided it was time for us to move. What had started out as a quick 2-year stop to get our foot in the employment door had turned into an eventful, yet overextended 9-year stay. We had never intended to be in Klamath that long. The hard drive through mountains to get to a mall and the lack of family support started to wear on us. I had been laid off, twice, and we worried about the future for our children. The employment opportunities, education options and general health of the basin made us nervous.

So I interviewed for jobs in the Portland area. (We had honeymooned there and I have a soft spot for that area.) We anxiously put our house on the market. We set our sights on moving and waited to see if anything would happen. Well, nothing did. A few showings, one offer that wasn't serious, but no luck. It was frustrating! We had blinders focused on moving and I just didn’t understand why it wasn’t happening NOW. That's when God decided it was the perfect time for us to have a baby (that's a story about waiting all itself.) That’s not moving! Looking back, of course it's easy to see that moving then was our idea and not what God had in mind.

After a year of having the house on the market, we decided to let the listing expire and enjoy our holiday season with a little less stress. After all, we just had a baby so wasn't that big enough? We also decided that I would stay at home with our daughter instead of paying for two kids in daycare. When our very independent son was a baby, I had a pretty great job doing marketing. Now that the economy had down-turned, it wasn’t quite so great. I took a deep breath and let go of moving and a career, for now. I struggled to accept that I wasn't going to be a working mom any more. I struggled with what that meant to my identity.

Our little girl, it turns out, is much more content to cuddle at home with mom or go out shopping, even if just for groceries. She was easily overwhelmed by situations and needed the security of being home. So I joined the mommy's group and started reading blogs and books about being a homemaker. I was going to accept this shift in thinking and embrace it.

But still I was waiting.

We needed the ‘next big thing’. It wasn’t until I learned about creative prayer in late January, that I really started to talk to God about His timing. I’ll be the first to tell you that I think his timing is terribly inconvenient. Can’t he just tell me what is going on so I can make plans?! And then the figurative dominoes God had put into place started to fall. I made a vow to myself to “pray about it more than I talk about it.” But it was so hard to wait even while God was doing something. But He was making things happen! My husband found a job to apply for, he got an interview, he got the job! Our house sold and everything came together.

This move is beyond my wildest imagination. I had ‘thrown it out there’ in my prayers about living in another country (done!), living by the ocean (done!), having better educational opportunities for my children (done!), experiencing the bigger world out there and so much more. Had things happened on our time frame, we would probably be struggling to make ends meet in a town that might not be quite the best fit for our family with very little support from family or employers.

It’s easier now for me to say “It’s ok to wait—God’s working on something bigger and better.”

Found on Pinterest (of course)!