The "Waiting Period"

In one day, I will be 40 weeks pregnant. 

To put it another way, in four days I will have been pregnant for 280 days.

280 days equal approximately 76.7 percent of any given year.

For me this means that I have been pregnant from January through the end of October.

Three seasons have passed -- Winter, Spring, and Summer -- and now, I find myself in the midst of Fall.

Interesting how life happens, how the universe conspires, and how no next phase in our lives can be experienced without first learning the lesson(s) that God would ultimately want for us to master.

Right now I am tired.  I am tired and uncomfortable.  I can't sit comfortably, I can't stand comfortably, and  I can't lay comfortably -- so most of my days now are spent somewhere "in between" feeling elated that this is almost over and miserable because it is not over yet.

The "in between." 

Funny how that's where I find myself physically and mentally.  Somewhere between my sleeping positions and awake positions, somewhere between praying for patience and anxiously awaiting for the manifestation of the past 279 days of hoping and waiting -- I find myself in arm's reach and in line-of-sight of my blessing....

But like so many other times in life, God is saying..."wait".

I could spend my life studying or observing the nature of "God" because I see "Him" flowing in, through, and around all things, actions, and people.  Yet, no matter how much I try to understand myself through God and vice versa...there is one persistent lesson that God has tried to teach me which is how to find the blessing in "waiting".

I've always been told that God can give you three answers to any request, "Yes, No, or Wait."  Unlike the first two options, the true difficulty in accepting an answer of "wait" is that you must resist your own impulse after 1 day, 2 months, or 3 years of waiting to intercede on your own behalf and to move forward under your own devices.

So I've never done well with....waiting.

Yet, after I hadn't gone into labor by week 38 and I realized that all I could do IS wait, I began to reflect a little deeper on this proverbial lesson that continues to pop up time and time again throughout my life. 

I won't sit here and lie and say that the past two - three weeks have been easy -- a time where I have sat by the Lake and reflected on these things with a smile until the revelation of God showered down on me like fruit coming out of the sky.  I've had my moments of rolling my eyes at God, trying to negotiate with him, and choosing to ignore him momentarily for kinder friends called cheesecake, cookies, and "The Office".
Yet, as my mother has reminded me as of late..."God is the perfect gentlemen and will wait for you until you are ready...."

Once I finally gave in and gave God my full attention -- he revealed to me that oftentimes there are three reasons for being in a "waiting period" -- 1) To re-evaluate, 2) To re-affirm, or 3) To re-direct.  After some time to reflect on what this means for my life -- I wanted to share what I have learned.
 
My Re-evaluation:

When we are in periods of "waiting" we must often re-evaluate our current situation not through the lens of our own minds but through the eyes of God.  While this may seem like a predicament since we are not God we must remember that we can petition him to help us see the bigger picture.  It is so easy to see the small picture -- merely because we are limited in our comprehension of life as humans -- however, oftentimes if we allow God to show us the "Gods-eye" view -- then the unlearned lessons, the unfinished tasks/goals, and even the unreleased pain that has kept us from reaching our blessing will be revealed to us.

For me -- I realized that I had to seal the deal on my relationship with God.  Despite my life-long relationship with God, I recognized that I had been ignoring one important question for the past 5-6 months.   This question was "Do I trust God or not?"  Despite my church going, bible-reading, and inspiration seeking ways, a few months ago I realized that I had not truly trusted God is quite some time which was revealed to me in my difficulty to allow myself to "hope' for things.

The truth is that after the death of my closest friend a few days after I turned 21 and after seeing my father have to fight for his life on multiple occasions -- I began to always wait for the other shoe to drop.  Even in the midst of my happiest moments, I felt a pang of anxiety at some point, hoping and praying that something horrible wasn't right around the corner.  So my fear and anxiety sustained my relationship with God for many years as opposed to my faith and hope in "Him".

Had it not been for my experience of being mocked by my church's "Jesus Police" (See Blog Entry: "Jesus Be a Fence - Part III) I would have never been forced to reconsider the level of trust that I had in a God that I believed in for so long.  As much it bothered me,  I realized that the reason that no one in the basement of the church that night believed that I knew Jesus that night was because I no longer did.  I had allowed the real foundation of our relationship - trust and hope to fade.

My Re-affirmation:



Simply put, Romans 8: 24-25 reads: 

"..But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it [with perseverance]."

After reading it, I felt like Paul had called me out from over the balconies of heaven.  I practiced "hope" of a boot-leg kind -- one where I didn't have to practice it until the blessing was already in my hands.

"Thank you Lord for getting me this job! I shole was hoping I would get it!"

"Thank you Lord for allowing me to be able to afford these shoes!  I shole was hoping that my debit card wouldn't get rejected!"

All very sad examples of putting "hope" in God.

But as God would have it -- here I find myself in a situation where all I can do is HOPE.  Sure I provided the egg and Pat provided the sperm -- but only by a flash of grace and after 279+ days of HOPING (for what I have not yet seen) can I bring my baby, my blessings, into the world.

My Re-direction:

So my redirection is choosing to walk in hope and not fear.  What I had to realize about the painful things of my past is that each and every time -- God has gotten me through each of them.  Whether death, heartbreak, illness, or loss of a friendship, etc -- each time, I have gotten through it undoubtedly wiser, stronger, and better.  So insofar as that I know that I can make it through the tribulations, in faith - in mind-boggling, makes no sense to the world, unshakable faith - I choose with excitement and anticipation to focus on the hope of the blessings that God has for me.

With Love,

Kirstin, mother of Roman Dean Smith