"Wait on me while you wait on me..."

"For singles, that's sometimes the scariest four-letter word ever: wait. You pray to meet someone special. God says wait. You pray to become a wife. God says wait. You pray to start a family. God says wait.

Just between you and me, don't you ever get tired of waiting?

Waiting implies inaction. It suggests remaining in a stagnant state for an undetermined length of time. We can't speed up waiting. We can't test out of it. All we can do is wait...

And wait...

And wait...

The hardest part about waiting is that we don't know what to do while we're waiting. If we could just do something to take our minds off the fact that we're waiting, maybe it wouldn't seem to go by so slowly.

Because this was such a difficult concept for me to grasp - knowing what to do while I waited - I finally sat down one day and had a talk with God. 'God, I know I have to wait on You. I fought it for a long time, but I've accepted it now. But what do I do in the meantime?'

He answered, 'Wait on Me.'

'God, I got that part. Didn't you just hear me? I said that I've accepted the fact that I'm supposed to wait on You. Just tell me what to do while I'm waiting.'

Again He answered, 'Wait.'

'So you want me to wait while I wait?'

'Yes.'

'God, I love You, and I don't want to sound disrespectful, but that's crazy! How can I wait while I wait?'

And He just smiled (that's how I pictured it, anyway) and said again, 'Just wait. You'll see soon enough what I mean.'

It took a shoe sale to finally make me understand what God was saying. After a sales lady brought me a huge stack of shoes, all in my size and all on sale, and laid them at my feet, it hit me.

All this time I was thinking of the usual definition of the word wait: to stay in one place or do nothing until something happens or in the expectation or hope that something will happen.

That's not what God wants us to do at all. We're forgetting that there's a second definition of the word wait: to be ready or available for somebody to take or use. To wait on someone is to serve someone. Butlers wait on their employers. Waiters wait tables. Salespeople wait on shoppers. There's nothing stagnant or inactive about any one of those.

God says, 'Wait on Me while you wait on Me.' In other words, 'Serve Me while you wait. Be active while you wait.'

Suddenly, waiting on God didn't seem boring at all."

Excerpt from the book:

"Who Has Your Heart?

The Single Woman's Pursuit of Godliness"

by Emily E. Ryan

Pgs 51-53