Waiting

The clock ticks at 4:00am, and I find myself sitting on the living room couch, wondering what exactly has me up before it’s even occurred to the sun to make an appearance.  No nightmares, no dreams of any kind that I can remember, just the tender prodding out of sleep a little after 3:00.  I am bone tired, but begging didn’t lure the Sandman back to me.  So, here I sit, laptop open, and I wait.

Most of the time, when I find myself awake at this unseemly hour, it’s God calling to me.  Does that sound strange?  I guess it doesn’t matter if anyone else considers it odd, but as I stare blankly at the darkened TV in front of me, I wait.

He’ll come; he always does, but patience is so difficult to achieve these days.  I want my conversation, my connection, and I want it now!  But the Almighty does not keep to my schedule.  And so, I wait.

I tend to be a creature of habit: awake at 8, protein shake, then coffee as I watch The Price is Right.  (You know all about that quirky fascination already.  So, there’s no point trying to explain it again.) But today, right now, that addiction is still hours away. So, still, I wait.

Suddenly my mind clicks onto the fact that I am waiting, and waiting might be the entire point.  “Peace.  Be still.”

Stillness tends to elude me as I am a “do-er.”  I could list out my resume beginning with all my clubs and activities in college and keep going through my last job and community involvement, but that proves nothing.  Take it at face value that I like to buzz through and around the hives searching for a flower, almost any flower, just to be productive.

“Patience, grasshopper,” seems to be whispered through my head, and my whole self rebels.  (Maybe because there are now two insect references in this piece.)  No waiting; only doing!  Very Yoda-ish, I know.  And what I so often fail to take into account is that I am not 21 anymore or even 30.  I reject out of hand the notion of my disability, because it’s a label I do not want, never wanted, and hate with every fiber of my being.  Still, liked or disliked, the fact of my own physical limitations frustrates me.  So, as my body sits still but for my typing fingers, I turn to my intellect.

I’ve always identified myself by my intelligence, my memory, my consciousness of the world around me.  But the daily migraines occasionally mess with that memory, and pain can numb me to my surroundings.  How can what I’ve always trusted, fail me while my hair is still (mostly) blonde and my face unlined?  My IQ carried my identity on its back for decades.  And now, yes, though I realize I still have His gift of intelligence, sometimes it lies under a fog so thick you’d need an axe to penetrate those clinging clouds. (Coffee works, too.)  But shouldn’t I know by now that what I do (or don’t do) does not define me?

Patience with myself, patience with others, even patience with Abba seems to elude me much of the time.  But now, I have no choice but to wait.  (BTW: Godot never showed.)  But God’s not Godot, and I am His beloved.  So, this waiting must serve Him in some, at least, small way.

When I was a little girl, we traveled a lot, moved a lot.  We made lots of road trips, lots and lots of road trips. Memories, oh, so , vivid of being the only one awake other than my dad behind the wheel as I sat nestled in the van seat watching the miles sped past through the darkness of the night.  Whether it was the faint outline of a Carolina pine forest filtered by the moonlight or the bright lights of the absolutely worst part of Dallas with their citizens fast asleep, I’d sit, eyes wide open counting down the time until our arrival at whatever destination had been set.

That time spent in silent solitude with my father, well, it’s one of my favorite childhood memories.  Peace, pale starlight, safety because my father was there when I was still comfortable with stillness itself – what happens now that those years have long faded to memory? When did I become such a “do-er?”

When did I snatch my life from the hands of He who lifts me, He who knows me intimately, beautifully, wholly?  Do you ever wonder about that, too?

If I were wiser than I am, braver than I am, I’d release the fists that grip “my”  future so tightly.  Though, even as I strain to maintain some false notion of command, I realize in the higher levels of my consciousness, that my control is merely an illusion, has always been an illusion. Still, I hold fast, while God works ever so diligently at gently tugging my fingers away one-by-one to release my human failings and fears and then to catch me as I fall headlong into Him.

He wants all of me, every little cell and atom, and He will stop at nothing to retrieve it.  I have belonged to Him since time immemorial, but often, as the layers of my life, my disappointments, my failures have piled onto my heart, I’ve forgotten to turn to Him, even in my greatest moments of despair – He the mighty Comforter (And that is sooooo not okay by Him).  I am His and His alone, and waiting, well, that’s just conceptual because to Him, to the Creator, He’s never left my side – has held me all along.  And I have only to turn to face Him to see that my feeling of purposeless waiting, like those long ago road trips, belongs to my past.

So, I wait on Him, knowing that this life, this time, is His alone.