Let your heart take courage

Psalm 27:14 says: "Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!"

My niece often asks me why there are sticky notes on my nightstand, on the back of my chair, sometimes stuck to the back of my cellphone, and on my bathroom mirror. While her bedroom walls are lined with posters of Justin Beiber and a sign that says "no boys alowd", mine are plastered with words of encouragement, sticky notes with important verses, quotes from my favorite people and lines of poetry or lines from my favorite books. I love words. Ever since I was reading Beverly Cleary and JK Rowling I have always found written words to be more powerful than spoken words. I tried to explain to her that they were important words that I like to be reminded of whenever I look around, but I'm pretty sure she thinks I'm a little crazy!

Psalm 27:14 is written on a sticky note on my nightstand. Every night I plug in my phone to charge and read these words before I lay my phone on the sticky note for the night. And every morning when my alarm goes off and I am blindly reaching for the snooze button, my fingers run across the green note and I am reminded to wait on the Lord.

Waiting is really hard!

If I went back through my past blog posts and tried to find a common theme, I would be willing to bet it would be the concept of waiting on the Lord. Sometimes I think that this period of my life is the only time I will have to "wait", but life is all about waiting on the Lord. In high school, I was waiting and biding my time wishing I was in college. In college I was waiting for adulthood. And now I wait for a husband or whatever God may have lined up next. And I can imagine that as I progress through the years to come I will again be asked to wait. I will wait for the right time to have children. I will wait for them to be old enough to start school. I will wait for their marriages. I will wait for retirement. And I could go on.

In the last few months I have been praying for God to reveal what it is I'm supposed to be doing now, because I feel like I'm just sitting around waiting for life to begin. I want to learn, I want to grow, I want to experience all that my life has to offer me, but I feel stuck. Where am I supposed to be in life? I worry that I am missing it, overlooking something that God is pushing me toward. But I had a revelation this morning as my eyes wandered to that sticky note on my nightstand. What if I am so busy worrying about what is to come, or what I'm supposed to be doing, that I am missing out on what He is actually trying to teach me: TO WAIT!

I looked up the word "wait" in the dictionary (because I love to know exactly what words mean!) and found a few different definitions that I don't usually associate with waiting.

to be available or in readiness; to look forward to eagerly

I usually think about waiting in terms of being inactive or neglected in some way. But if I redefine waiting, I can see that an army is trained and ready to spring into action at any time, but until they are needed, they wait, they continue to train and get stronger in the process of waiting. People wait eagerly and passionately, clearing the way for whatever it is they are expecting. 

From now on, I want to learn to actively wait. I want to wait in readiness of whatever it is God is preparing. I want to use this time to strengthen myself, using the challenge of learning to wait patiently as a stepping stone to a great future that is ahead of me. I will remember that waiting is an essential part of life, because if we all got exactly what we wanted at the exact moment we first began to want it, we would be like a spoiled child who has never learned what it takes to survive this life. 

The name of the game is WAITING and I am learning to embrace it.