Purpose in the Waiting

Waiting. Waiting on orders. Waiting on housing. Waiting on a deployment to end…or start. Waiting for your truck with household goods to arrive. Waiting for promotion results. Waiting to pin on rank.

We do an inordinate amount of waiting in the military. Sure, everyone has to wait for things in their lives, but so much of our lives are in other people’s hands that I truly do think we spend more time waiting than the average citizen. And it’s not easy!

And sometimes you wait for something only to discover you have to wait again!

At more than one point in my husband’s career, we were told where he would be stationed next—the most memorable was Guam—only to be told later, “Just kidding!” Okay, so that’s not how they said it, but that is how it felt.

It has taken me MANY years of military life to accept that my life is not my own and I don’t get to plan very far ahead. Waiting is hard! And I’m not very good at it.

I know you can relate because I have met many of you who are the same way.

Why?! Why must we wait? This is a question I find myself asking often in the middle of the waiting. Usually, the question is out of frustration. Or blame. I often blame the “they” of the Air Force for the waiting.

“If they just had their act together, they would have this figured out.”

“If only they would ask ME, I would not make people wait!”

But over the years, I have looked back and have discovered there was purpose for the waiting in my life.

Sometimes it has provided me time to have a change of heart. Often by the time we actually do find out the answer, I am ready for whatever that answer will be.

Sometimes the waiting has provided us with some family time we did not expect. My husband went through SAASS a few years ago, aptly named the book-a-day club due to the fact that they were literally assigned a new book to read each day. It consumes the students. Our boys were still very young and in the midst of writing his thesis, I had a freak medical situation that required surgery in another city. It was a trying year, to say the least. We were one of the first families to know our follow-on assignment, but we did not have orders, so we could not schedule movers. By the time we had orders in hand, the moving companies were backed up for weeks. Our gaining base allowed us to wait until we could get the movers to come. So, we decided to take a trip to Disney World. After all, we were a mere day’s drive away and now we had extra time! It was precious family time that we desperately needed and would not have gotten if we had not had to wait for those orders.

Sometimes the waiting has given me an opportunity to relate to others with more compassion than if I had not walked through that experience. We miscarried our first baby and it seemed like it took forever to get pregnant again. The waiting was hard, but I grew so much in my understanding of what others go through with loss and infertility. Since then, I have been able to reach out to those walking through those hard seasons from a place of empathy. It didn’t make the waiting easy, but it did give it purpose.

There are at least a hundred other purposes for waiting because we each face different circumstances and situations. Don’t misunderstand, I usually can’t see the purpose while I’m waiting. But by now, I have waited enough to believe what Lysa Terkeurst says in her book “It’s Not Supposed To Be This Way” (emphasis mine):

“We don’t have to know the plan to trust there is a plan.

“We don’t have to feel good to trust there is good coming.

“We don’t have to see evidence of changes to trust that it won’t always be this hard.”