On Seasons of Waiting (and other ramblings)

I don’t like waiting. Chances are, you don’t either.

In the past 6 months, I have been going through the longest, hardest waiting season of my life. My chronic illness reared its ugly head one too many times and I made the decision to drop out of college, move home, and prioritize stabilizing my health. It has been one of the hardest, most draining things I’ve ever done, and with very little reward to show for it. There is nothing glamorous about being debilitatingly ill.

I’ve been doing a lot of waiting. Waiting for doctor’s appointments. Waiting for new treatment options. Waiting for relief. Waiting for my strength to return. Waiting for my circumstances to change.

I put my life on hold for my health and put all my energy into healing my body, but so far nothing has changed.

This has been incredibly discouraging for me. I want to move on in life. I want to move out, go back to school, or get a job. Let’s be honest, juggling doctor’s appointment schedules and blood test results isn’t exactly every millennial’s dream.

As I’ve waited these last few months, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that I’m missing out on life—the life I wanted to have. This isn’t how I pictured my young adult years at all.

I don’t know what season you are in today, but you are probably waiting for something too. I want to encourage you that waiting for something doesn’t mean you have to put your life on hold. We could spend our whole lives waiting for the next thing, consumed with discontentment. We could put our lives on hold in our waiting seasons and obsess over the future. But then we would never truly live.

Life is a waiting. People wait for graduation, for relationships, for jobs, or for kids. That’s just how life goes.

In my seasons of waiting, I have allowed myself to be so consumed by the fear of what I was missing that I didn’t see the beauty in what I was living.

Waiting won’t keep me from living anymore.

I want to embrace each season of my life as I trust that my sovereign God knows the future.

Even in the waiting, I can keep growing, learning, and loving. Shifting my eyes from the pain of my waiting to the purpose in my waiting was a critical perspective change that I needed to make. Every season of life brings unique challenges and blessings. I don’t want to become so focused on the challenges that I miss out on the blessings.

No matter what my current circumstances are, there are always relationships to be nurtured, friends to be made, ways I can grow, and ministry to be done right where I’m at. Sometimes I just have to get a little creative to figure all that out.

The waiting seems unbearable sometimes. This season of my life really sucks for a lot of reasons. I still hope for relief and physical improvement, and I will keep waiting.

But I will also keep living.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”
Ecclesiastes 3:1 ESV

-Alathia