My dad is a carpenter by trade. As I grew up, I spent a considerable amount of time at some of his job sites watching him turn an empty room into a masterpiece. I remember one time he recruited Mom and I to help him with a huge tile job. I walked into a basement to find what was, without a doubt, the most unusual floor covering I had ever seen. There were seven different colors of eighteen-inch square tiles spread across the floor in no particular order. “There’s no pattern,” I observed, somewhat shocked.
That’s when my dad chuckled and informed me that I was staring at the most complex pattern he had ever created. When the owners of the house told him that they didn’t want a pattern, Dad had to carefully create a pattern that would give the appearance of no pattern. I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to wrap my mind around that concept. To the untrained eye, that basement appears to be a jumbled mess of color, but in the eyes of the master carpenter, it’s a carefully concocted design. I believe that’s the way God works in our lives.
To be perfectly honest, my life doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t know why I was raised in the woods of Ohio with four siblings. I don’t know why I’m obsessed with names and their meanings, or why I think that life should be a musical. I’m not sure why I feel so compelled to write the thoughts that stir in my heart, and I certainly don’t know how all of those things tie together to make any sense at all. When I look at my life, I often see it like I saw that basement I helped Dad grout. It appears to be so random and sporadic that I can’t imagine there is any sort of pattern there at all. But there is a pattern, though it can only be seen by the Master Carpenter.
Check out these verses referring to God’s carefully concocted pattern for our lives:
“All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.” -Psalm 139:16“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
before you were born I set you apart;
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” -Jeremiah 1:5“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” -Jeremiah 29:11
These verses and others like them are a reminder that my life is an intricate pattern created by the hand of the Master Carpenter. The same hand that set the universe in motion carefully arranged every detail of my life. Though I cannot see the pattern with my untrained eyes, I trust that when the job is completed, the “tiles” of my life will rest in the exact place they were intended to go, and my life will be the masterpiece God purposed to design.
Yesterday, I had one of those days. You know, the kind of day where you fume about stupid stuff and think things like, “I’m not going to get married for the next hundred bajillion years because I don’t even want to deal with this junk.” It took moving 450 miles away from home for me to realize that guy/girl friendships are difficult to come by. I don’t know if that fact makes me want to hug my old guy friends and apologize for all the years I’ve taken them for granted, or slap them in the face and yell at them for making me believe that our relationships were normal. I think what I felt yesterday was a combination of the two. I could have walked right up to one of them and shouted, “Thanks for being amazing, jerk.”
It has been over ten months since I’ve prayed a heartfelt, in-depth prayer for my future husband. That may seem crazy to you as it does seem to go against every book you’ll find on waiting for Prince Charming. I thought I was crazy myself, at first. But it can’t be any more crazy than how crazy I felt back when I was faithfully praying for my knight in shining armor. I didn’t stop praying because I got the impression that the man I will one day marry is above falling, but because I know how prone I am to fall myself. When I was consistently praying for my future husband, I was constantly thinking about him. And because I thought of him so often, I got to a point where I wasn’t content with living without him. That’s why I dropped the specific prayers. That’s why I shredded the list of things I wanted in a husband. Maybe it’s the novelist in me, but when I write a guy out on paper, he becomes real and eventually becomes all I think about. But he shouldn’t be all I think about during this stage of my life. That’s why when it comes to this delicate subject of waiting, I decided to, well, stop waiting. If I’m going to live in this moment here and now, I can’t be dwelling on a future with him. 
One time, when I was walking through a really difficult circumstance in my life, I had this reoccurring vision (that felt like a nightmare when I was wide awake) about a whirlpool and an eagle. I was drowning in the whirlpool, but trying to grab hold of this eagle that was soaring above the waves. The vision made absolutely no sense… until I stumbled upon Psalm 18. This particular Psalm talks about God being a refuge when the floods of destruction are sweeping over you. As I read this Psalm, I remembered my whirlpool, then I read the words, “he soared on the wings of the wind.” I don’t know that I’ve ever had a passage of Scripture take my breath away like that verse did. The eagle in the vision that I kept reaching out for was Jesus. That one passage of Scripture that is repeated twice in the Bible told me the end of my vision:
If you browse through your local radio stations, you’ll probably hear a lot of songs about breaking up. It would seem that a lot of artists enjoy singing about sweet revenge. To be perfectly honest, I’ve caught myself laughing at some of the lyrics… but only because I’ve never even considered doing such things. “I pray your brakes go out going down a hill”? Really? Or how about Carrie Underwood’s song about completely trashing her ex’s car?
The other night, I watched A Snoodle’s Tale. If you’ve never seen that episode of Veggietales, I would encourage you to look it up. It’s a must see – even if you don’t like Veggietales. It’s the story of a little Snoodle who is told time and time again, “You’re puny, you’re silly, you’re not all that smart, you can’t use your wings and you’re no good at art!” With every lie he is told, a picture is stuffed into the pack he carries on his back. Eventually, the small, dejected Snoodle leaves town, escaping to the top of Mount Ginches where he thinks he will be alone with his thoughts and the finches. He comes to find that he is, in fact, not alone. A Man lives there on top of Mount Ginches. The exchange that happens between the Man and the Snoodle is something that I find to be infinitely freeing, but here’s what jumped out at me the other night:
Beyond Waiting 