Waiting--Is it Christmas yet?

How often in life we feel like we are in Advent, the season of the church year before Christmas when we wait and watch for Jesus Christ to be born.

As children, we wait to turn six so we can enter the first grade. We wait to become a teenager. We wait till we turn 16 so we can drive a car. We wait till we are 21 so we can have a legal drink. We wait through nine months for a baby to be born. Someday we may wait to die, or watch while someone else waits to die.

It seems, at times, that all we do is wait. Soon after we purchased our 2008 Chevy pickup, we were driving in California when the transmission locked up. After waiting for the tow truck, we waited for the new transmission for the truck to arrive.

Four and one-half months later, we waited for a week in Klamath Falls, OR, for a part for our broken RV landing gear, that we thought had been ordered, to arrive. It hadn't. Someone did a temporary fix and we made it to another town, where we waited for new parts, that had been ordered, to arrive.

During that wait, we decided to buy a new RV. So we waited for the new rig to come from Indiana.

Then we decided to become full-time RVers and we waited for our house to be rented.

Now we wait again. Last Tuesday a new RV air conditioner was ordered under our warranty. We thought it would arrive Friday, or Monday at the latest. It still isn't here. One truck line turned it over to another truck line, but now no one knows where it is. So still, we wait.

At least we have had lots of practice for this wait. The practice comes in December every year. And it comes in lots of the events of our life.

Will we ever learn to do it with total grace and peace?