Patience in the Wait

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Have you ever had to have patience in the wait? You know, those times when you know that the road before you is going to be incredibly long and incredibly treacherous, however, there is nothing you can do but walk through it one agonizing step at a time.

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Actually, this is where I find myself often in the past ten years.

Patience has never really been my strong suit. Waiting for something we long for can be so very hard. I am fully able to work towards a goal, but I find that if I know when the end is I can tolerate it so much better. Even if the end is a long way off, just knowing where the end is makes it more bearable than having an open-ended wait.

Of course there are things that we will never know an end time to, not even a little bit. This could be things like getting married, having children, getting a job promotion, being healed from sickness or disease, or waiting for a prodigal child to come home. These can all be some of life’s most challenging seasons of waiting. The list could go on and on, but these are just a few of these waiting periods that come to mind.

One way that I have come up with to cope with a time of waiting when I know where the end will be, at least to some extent, is to write a checklist countdown by week. Obviously a monthly checklist wouldn’t offer enough satisfaction in crossing off the countdown, at least not for me, and a daily countdown would depress me unless the wait was a very short one.

My most recent countdown was a long one, I think the longest I have ever had, and although I was eager to start checking off the weeks at first, looking at the list of weeks yet to come seemed endless and kind of had the opposite effect this time around.

At that point, I decided to just let my countdown sit for a time, although I did think about it every Sunday, which was the day I chose to cross the week off each time. I knew the countdown was there, I could picture checking a week off in my mind, which gave me a small amount of satisfaction, but yet I didn’t have the long list of weeks yet to come staring me in the face.

I gave it a long time, nearly a year before I opened the list back up, and can I tell you how freeing it felt to cross off nearly 50 weeks in one swoop?! It was exhilarating! I am back on track to checking the week off every Sunday, and I am back to looking forward to crossing each new week off.

This is something I have done about 10 times over the past 15 years or so. Generally, it works so well for me. I think in a way the act of crossing the number off makes me feel as though I am in control of the wait somehow.

Maybe if you are in a time of waiting this could help you in some way. Maybe you have another way of coping you’d like to share, and maybe you just know a little bit more about me and how I can be a bit OCD at times.

Waiting for something is a universal experience and one that is never very easy. Finding a way to make it bearable for your own self can make the wait so much better. Maybe my system  can help you find patience in the wait.