Waiting

We took our kids to a water park while on vacation this summer. Usually I stay in the small kiddie area with our two younger children while my wife takes our two older children to the big kid areas. My wife took some pity on me and let me take our oldest son to one of the newer slides. We stood in line for about 30 minutes, which I did not think was that bad of a wait for the new slide… However my oldest child thought the line was moving slower than a snail’s pace. I may have had a little different perspective than my oldest child, since just a few weeks before I had been to a different water park with Junior High and High School students from our Church. At that water park there were several slides/attractions that the wait was anywhere from 2 – 4 hours.

As my oldest child and I waited in line I heard myself utter something that only a parent says… “You know you are going to have to get used to standing in line, it’s just part of life.” I surprised myself by saying something so “parent.” But that statement got me to thinking…

While waiting in line is something most of us have to do on a regular basis, we are not very good at waiting. You would think that with all the lines we have to wait in, we would be a more patient people, but the opposite seems true. We seem to be less patient with others. We seem not to want to wait, even though somewhere deep inside we know we have to…

We have packed our lives so full of activities that to wait anywhere throws off our schedule. Even when we take time to relax or take a vacation, we don’t want to wait; we don’t want to be patient. For many of us the start of a new school year is a time we can start new activities/projects or pick up those things we laid aside for the summer. Maybe with a new school year we need to reevaluate what we do and why we do it. Maybe we need to stop doing a few things that for one reason or another, we have been roped into, so that we have more time for those things that are important to us.

We grow to be more patient as we choose to be patient. We are surrounded by those who choose to be impatient, but we can choose to be different, and as we choose to be different we might just be surprised at the difference we make in the lives of others.