People sometimes look at me and think I have everything. Maybe not financially, but at least relationally. People see that I live in Los Angeles and have a wonderful wife and three great kids and they think I have everything I’ve ever wanted. And it’s true that I have been unbelievably blessed. But what people often don’t see is the waiting that I went through to get to where I am.
I moved to Los Angeles when I was 28. I wanted to move out here a lot sooner but circumstances didn’t allow me to do so. 28 is not that old in the rest of the country, but in Los Angeles getting started at 28 is a non-starter. Trust me, if you wait to move to Hollywood until you are 28, don’t bother, because you are already way too late.
I didn’t get married until I was 32. In fact, I didn’t have sex until I was 32. Think about that. To some of you waiting a few weeks to have sex seems like a lifetime. Trust me, 32 years feels like several lifetimes. While others around me were having the fun I wanted to have I was waiting.
I didn’t have children until I was almost 35. Now don’t get me wrong, I think 35 is a great age to have children. But where I come from in the South you get married and start having children far younger than that. Many of my hometown friends are not chasing around three children under two years old as they near their 37th birthday.
I’m not saying there’s a perfect age for any of these things. I’m only saying that if I had gotten the opportunity to pick the perfect time for me, it probably would have involved a lot less waiting.
I’ve had to wait a lot in my life. Like you have. We live in an instant society and that makes waiting a hard thing to do. It’s hard for us to wrap our head around the fact that most things worth having take time. Often a lot of time.
We all have to wait. Everyone is waiting for something they want. If you think about it, most of life is spent waiting. So if we are going to wait, how do we wait correctly? How can we make waiting work for us? Here are three of my best guesses.
How to win the waiting game
The number one thing you can do to win the waiting game is to wait with a purpose. The key is not is what you are doing during the waiting, but what you are becoming. Your goal is to become the person that is ready for the arrival of the thing you are waiting on. Character is built during times of waiting.
You have to realize that anything worth having is worth having patience. We live in an instant gratification world so we think that everything should come quickly and easily. But the things that are actually important in life rarely come quickly or easily. The value of something is assessed by the amount someone is willing to pay for it. Sometimes that price is paid through patience. But trust me when I tell you that in the end you will value it far more.
Lastly, it’s important to realize that humans see life as a matter of time, but God sees life as a matter of timing. Think about it, when has God ever been in a rush? It’s true that God is never late, but he is also never early. Humans are time bound creatures so we think in blocks of time, but God has no such constraint. He knows that the time something takes to happen is less important than the timing of it happening being correct. This is just a guess, but I would bet that often when we are waiting on God to do something, he is waiting on us to get ourselves ready for him to do it.
