Generally speaking, I am not a very patient person. I can be patient with people, but it is often difficult for me to be patient with circumstances. Mostly, I don’t like to wait.
I don’t like to wait for meetings or appointments.
I don’t like to wait to for the people I live with when we need to leave somewhere (although more often than not, they wait for me…sorry, missionaries!).
I especially don’t like to wait for life to unfold—I want to know what my life will be like, where I’ll live, what I’ll be, and I want them all to be true now. (I know, I know. That would take all the fun out of things. I’m learning to embrace the not knowing.)
On this journey for greatness, I can see who I want to become: brave, generous, openhearted, strong, bold, courageous, fun (although I will say I think I’m pretty fun already…), but sometimes I am overwhelmed by how far I have to go to get there. Let’s be real: I want to wake up tomorrow and be those things immediately. I don’t want to wait. I don’t want it to be a process. I want it to be fast—boom, done.
I’m reading a book by Christine Caine called Unstoppable, and in it she retells the story of the Old Testament’s King David. He was chosen from among all of his brothers by God to be Israel’s king. He was such an unlikely candidate that his father didn’t even present him as an option, but God whispered in the prophet Samuel’s heart that there was one more brother to interview for the job. Samuel anointed David as king pronto and he ascended the throne right away and ruled for decades.
Just kidding.
David was anointed pretty quickly—in other words, given God’s divine purpose for his life—but he didn’t actually become the king for fifteen years.
It wasn’t an idle fifteen years, either. David grew and learned how to be a king, and he fought Goliath and became braver and stronger by the day so that when he did take the throne, he really was the best man for the job.
I hope it doesn’t take me fifteen years to reach God’s great plan for my life. But it could. No matter how long it takes, it’s bound to be a process. Like David, I need this time to grow and learn, and fight a Goliath, and become braver and stronger. In the end, I have no doubt I will become all the things I want to be, but getting there requires my now. It requires this journey, this process. God loves me enough to place me in the circumstances I need in order to become the woman he’s called me to be. It isn’t by chance I am where I am.
I only have to decide whether I’ll enjoy the process or not.
