What To Do While Waiting

"My son, if you accept my words
and store up my commands within you,

turning your ear to wisdom
and applying your heart to understanding,

and if you call out for insight
and cry aloud for understanding,

and if you look for it as for silver
and search for it as for hidden treasure,

then you will understand the fear of the LORD
and find the knowledge of God." Proverbs 2:1-5

While we are in a time of waiting here, it could be so easy to do just that. To sit and wait. To go about daily life as normal, just patiently waiting for the day that God would say to us to go, and then show us where to go. I know we do that with our regular every day stuff. We look at the calendar and say there's less than 100 days to Christmas, and while we know that in our minds, and we also know that we like to give people gifts, yet we tend to not go out and buy our gifts until the last minute. We do that with the summer even. We enjoy the lazy days of summer and then all the sudden there's only a few weeks left, and there's a huge list of things to do that we never got around to. We're so content to just wait for the next thing to come along. But this time, it's going to be different.

This time, while we are waiting to see where God wants us, we are going to do our own work to get to that point. Rather than wait for God to come to us we are going to spend some time going to him. We're spending a little more time in His Word, praying that His words will hold meaning in our lives. We're spending a little more time in prayer, not so much praying for ourselves, but for the many people that the Holy Spirit has placed on our minds to pray for. We're going to make the choice to not spend our Sunday afternoons watching football and instead focus on our children and spending time with them. Basically, we're taking action while we're waiting, instead of simply waiting. And everything that we are doing, everything that we are making our focus, will help us as we turn the next page. Spending time in God's Word could never be a bad thing, and the more time we spend in it, the more God may reveal to us. We want to store up his commands in our hearts so that we can reflect that to those around us.

And maybe by being proactive about this, other areas of life will naturally fall in. I can't tell you how many times I'll look at a clock and think to myself that I only have so many minutes left before I have to do this or that, so then instead of doing something productive, I'll sit at the computer for those 10 or 15 minutes. Do you know how much other things I could get done in 10 minutes? I can clean my living room top to bottom in 10 minutes. Do I do it? Of course not, that would be productive. I would like to be more mindful of those little nuggets of time that I am wasting away. And the first step, at least for me, is to give some of those nuggets of time to God and ask Him to help me use them wisely.

Anyway, it's a good thing to do as long as we're waiting anyways, right? And if I can just take that mindset and make it mine, I think I'll be in better shape because of it.