Waiting

5:58 AM Posted In Edit This 1 Comment »
Say not ye,
There are four months, and then cometh the harvest?
behold, I say unto you,
Lift up your eyes and look on the fields;
for they are white already to harvest.
John 4:35

So much of our lives we are told to wait; wait for supper, wait for the weekend, wait until tomorrow, wait until later. It seems we virtually spend out lives waiting for something that truly never gets here.

I had a conversation a few days ago that really got me thinking... well, you'll see.

I was with a dear friend of mine and we were discussing how unprepared she feels that her teenage step-daughter is for life as an adult, or even life as a high-school student. My friend pointed out that people spend their entire lives preparing (
and waiting) for the next stage of life:

When you are an infant, you are preparing to be a toddler.

When you are a toddler, you are preparing to be a child.

When you are a child, you are preparing to be a teenager.

When you are an teenager, you are preparing for college.

When you're in college, you are preparing to be an adult.

When you're an adult, you are preparing to be a parent.

When you are a parent, you are preparing to be a grandparent.

When you are a grandparent, you are preparing to leave this world.

It's true, isn't it?

As a homeschooling mom who sees her children through each stage of life, I feel it every day. I am constantly preparing, I am constantly
waiting for the next event, the next bedtime, the next morning, the next meal, the next day, the next week, the next year and the here and now gets lost in the mix.

It's sad. In all my waiting, I forget one very important thing:

Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added to you.
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow,
for tomorrow will worry about its own things.
Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

Matthew 6:33-34

We cannot spend our entire lives waiting on the next thing. Should we be prepared? Absolutely. Should we be so over-prepared that whatever eventuality happens we can cover? Maybe, or maybe not. Should so much of our energy go into preparing for tomorrow (or the day after, or the day after that, or the day after that) that we don't have time for what's happening today? Absolutely not!

There must be the time that we stop preparing, that we stop waiting for what is about to happen and focus our energy on what is happening, here, right now. We have to take the time to
not rush our babies into children or our children into adults because our time at each stage of life goes by so quickly.

Yesterday, I told my husband's grandmother I could never envision Harmony big enough to wear a size 2t clothes and today she's far beyond that. Just like that
snap my baby is a child.

Last night, I spent awake cuddling my sweet, milky Jude all night and today, he's stubbornly insisting he's too big for diapers and crawling onto the potty himself, against the protests of his clueless mommy that he's just a baby still- he has plenty of time before he has to potty train later.

I don't want to wake up tomorrow and have grandchildren at my feet. I know that I will, all parents do. But at least for
today I can be here, I can love this moment, I can live in the now and stop waiting for what I've already prepared for.


1 comments:

Celee said...

My problem is planning. I live so much of my life in the future that I all too often neglect the here and now. I'm always looking ahead to that next book or next week or next vacation or next child. I have to constantly remind myself to live today like it counts forever. I try to think about what I would want to do today if I didn't have a tomorrow.

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