That toe-tapping time [in be]tween

The Bible is a lot like Facebook.

Perhaps that statement requires a bit of explanation, lest you think I believe Moses had a timeline and posted daily selfies with captions like "Struck a rock today and a fountain came pouring out. #waterbender".

Let me rephrase. The stories I read throughout the old and new testaments can evoke the same emotions I feel when scrolling through my Newsfeed on Facebook.

Picture this: as I sit in front of my computer, chewing my nails to stubs while trying to fill out one more job application or figure out one more contingency plan in case something else falls through, my fingers somehow find their way to that gargantuan behemoth of a website in the obscure hope that the elusive words or thoughts I am looking for will be mysteriously hidden among the instagrammed pictures of food and overabundance of updates from Spotify. Scrolling through the posts reveals many words and thoughts, but not necessarily the ones I want to see.

This friend just accepted a position at a prestigious hospital!
This friend is going backpacking across Europe for four months!
This friend is going to graduate school!

I am truly happy for them, and yet discouraged at the same time. Why aren't these great, awesome things happening for me, too? Compared to the news from my friends and family, my life is so static, slow, and ineffective.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. There is a huge red flag right there. "Compared to the news..."
Compared to what news? What kinds of things do people post on the internet? Well I can tell you what they don't post. They don't talk about the two hours they spent cleaning. Or the half an hour they spent on hold with the insurance company. Or the grounds they spilled on the counter this morning while trying to start the coffee pot in the dark. Basically, the boring, monotonous things that happen to everybody all the time.
I wind up comparing my everyday, minute-by-minute, behind the scenes life with the glowing highlights of everyone else's.

Bad news bears.

So how is this like the Bible again? Right, I'm supposed to be making a point.
Consider the stories that we learn in Sunday School.
God promised Abraham he would become the father of a great nation, a multitude of people. And he did! He and Sarah had Isaac, who had Jacob, who had twelve sons, who then started the tribes of Israel.
Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers, but he became second in command of all of Egypt and saved his family from a famine.
Moses became the leader of the Israelites,  following God's call to take them out of Egypt, and he performed many miracles through God's power.
Jesus had an incredible ministry, demonstrating God's love to us and showing us, through words and actions, how to live as a part of God's kingdom on earth. Then he conquered death in a final, resounding strike that echoed across every age and nation!

YEAH, GOD. I'm PUMPED. I'm READY. Let's go!

....Ready, go.

... ...Go?

...now?

And nothing happens. For a while. So I become discouraged when I'm not parting Red seas or raising people from the dead between raising my dead-weight body from the mattress and parting my bagel for the toaster oven. Am I missing something here?
Yeah, yeah you are, April. Let's go back and revisit some of those stories.

God promised Abraham he would become the father of a great nation.
God did this. And Abraham became the father of the Israelites.
And when did the nation of Israel begin?
Well, after Abraham was dead. The twelve tribes of Israel came from the twelve sons of Jacob who didn't even consider procreating until old Abe was long gone. Oh, yeah. What about Isaac, his promised son? Surely that had to have happened in his lifetime. In fact, God promised Abraham that he would give him a son and Isaac was born.... 25 years later. Abraham waited for God to fulfill his promise for a period of time that was longer than my entire life.

Joseph became second in command and saved his family from a famine.
Joseph did awesome things. He saved entire countries from starvation, became a powerful and wise leader, and displayed an upright and gracious spirit toward his family, forgiving them for the wrongs they committed against him. But before all of that happened, he was a slave. He spent years in prison.
We can see the story in its entirety. We can look back on the event's of Joseph's life and connect all the pieces, seeing the hand of God in everything that happened. But when Joseph was right in the middle of it all, he couldn't see the end! He didn't know what was coming! For 13 years, he faithfully trusted God in suffering and waited on God to reveal the plan and the purpose.

I could talk more about how Moses hid in the desert for 40 freaking years before he even started leading the Israelites or how Jesus spent the first 30 years of his life waiting for his Father to give the okay to start his ministry, but I think you get the point.
The accomplishments these men achieved with the power and help of God shine out brightly from the pages of my Bible, and the brilliance of their high points often distract me from the years they spent waiting or the hardships they suffered. The Bible is so concise, that sometimes it is hard to feel the full impact of what it means to spend 25 YEARS waiting on God to fulfill a promise. What was it like for Abraham to wake up in the early morning hours, walk out of his tent, and wonder in anticipation if this was the day that Sarah would announce, "I'm pregnant, love!" What frustrated thoughts ran through his mind as he smeared goat cheese on his falafel when it was not that day yet again?

This morning, as I sit on my couch with my cup of coffee, listening to my refrigerator hum and my roommate get ready for the day in the bathroom, I am waiting.

I'm waiting on God.

Yesterday, at 8:53 AM Eastern Daylight Time on April 24, 2013, I turned in my very last college final exam, which marked the end of my undergraduate career. The end to a 4 year era of nursing school.
What is supposed to come next is very vague and undefined. God has clearly called me to pursue a certain path after graduation, but he didn't exactly give me an itinerary or a how-to instruction manual. So I'm stuck in my breath by breath, minute-to-minute real time life, unable to see the end result and trusting in God that he knows what is going on.

I think that God is an optimizer, though. He uses the time we spend waiting to make us ready for what is coming in the future. Abraham and Joseph and Moses and Jesus didn't wallow in their waiting! They didn't sit idly by and say, "Well, God's got big things planned for me in the future, so I'm just going to hang out until it comes." No! They passionately and purposefully sought after God, allowing him to transform them into people who were prepared and equipped to do the things that He had for them to do.

They were faithful in their waiting, and God was faithful in his promises.

So I'm taking encouragement from them this morning, and making a commitment to not waste the waiting. I'll let God use me, shape me, and mold me while I anticipate what he has set in place for the years ahead. I'll be fully present in each moment to grow into the right person for the job.

And when the time comes, I won't hesitate, but will step forward in courage and excitement, cause I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

"For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." Ephesians 2:10

April Problems

Sometimes, I can be a pretty oblivious person.

Even though I’ve been posting words on the interwebs for public consumption ever since I started this blog, it never quite clicked in my mind that people were actually reading what I wrote. Occasionally, I would receive a comment on a post, or a friend would tell me in person, “Hey, I read your blog last night,” but I would simply think “Oh, that’s nice” and move on with my life.

However, the massive response to my last post caught me completely by surprise. Within a day, my page view counter shot into the thousands and people I had never met before at my school were approaching me to say how much they loved my blog.

Oh! Ummm….thank you! I mean…yeah.

Wait, what is this? People are reading what I write? And they like it?

While it was nice for a while, the inevitable happened. As I sit here this morning, the view counter on my blog homepage displays an indelible mark, a spike that vaguely resembles the Eiffel tower or the Washington monument. The more I stare at it, the bigger it gets. This spike has taunted me every time I’ve sat down to write for the past two and a half weeks, and my mind was paralyzed by this pressure to measure up to my previous standard.

There is this awareness that people are actually interested in what I have to say, and I feel compelled to meet their expectations.

Be funny. Do it, April. People want you to be funny.

YOU HAVE TO BE FUNNY RIGHT NOW.

But…but…but…

And so, you have gotten no words from me for the past two weeks.

However, today I am choosing to get over myself and remember that, contrary to what I may think, the world will not end if some random stranger reads my blog and says, “Well, that was stupid.”

I know, right? Life-changing revelation right there. They should just induct me into the World Changers Hall of Fame already. I’d love to have my bronzed, eerily detached and floating head enshrined on a pedestal next to John, oops, David Green and the two-headed Gaither monster.

I thought I learned this lesson once before, but I guess it didn’t stick.

So. Moving on.

This is the fourth month of the year. A very special thirty day period in which I feel like a schizophrenic because my name gets tossed around everywhere. The month of April. It is all my own, my precious.

Contrary to popular opinion, no I was not born in April and therefore my parents did not name me such because of my birth month. Honestly, if my parents had been so dull and uncreative, I would be a little miffed at them. Also, you are not the first person to think that. Sorry to break it to you.

I’m curious as to why people find it so interesting, though. Yes, my name is a month of the year. But think about it. Other people are named after birds. Or plants. Or Biblical ideals.

I’m not complaining. It is a rather unique name, and I’ve never really had to share it with anyone else.

I am a tall person. I tend to tower over my classmates on a normal day.

However, I am also a woman, and I love high heels.

This can be an unfortunate combination.

Here is a diagram to illustrate:

Normal Day

High Heels!!

3 out of the past 4 days, I have worn 4 inch heels. This results in a grand total of approximately 6 feet 2 inches. One of the most entertaining things in the world is watching people’s facial expressions when they turn around and crane their necks to stare up at me, blocking the sun with my head.

It’s the simple joys in life.