Even as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is dearth. We can be so attuned to what we desire that has not manifested that we come away starved from our own thought process, our vision narrowed by what has not yet appeared.
But lest we be a little too hard on ourselves for our own felt lack of patience, it bodes well to remember that it is sometimes referred to as “long suffering.” The wise King Solomon also wrote: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”
So what do we do when we are waiting for a desire to be fulfilled? As noted last post, waiting is a verb—it is not necessarily an absence of activity or anything else unless we choose to frame it that way. And while waiting is a time of sublimation and the restraint of certain yearnings, it is key to remember during the moments we are bent in a manner we did not choose or do not prefer, we still choose how we wait.
Waiting can involve quiet rest or agonizing journeys into cyclical thinking that seems to get us further from the point than where we started.
However, if it is true that we can choose our strategy through the season of waiting, then we have several unplanned gifts in the form of tools at our fingertips. The first, again, is patience: “But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” (James 1:4)
The second tool is when the truth becomes part of us that we truly have power over our thought processes and emotions. While the decision to exert responsibility over our soul might be instantaneous, the practice and honing of it takes time–often, a lifetime. And yet, is worth every single second.
The final gift is the gaining of that which we have waited for—or the realization that we never needed it to begin with. Either way, the result is satisfaction. And in the meantime, we are allowed to enjoy contentment on the way to what we are waiting for. It certainly beats the alternative, as we all know too well.