A Lesson in Waiting

It has been a while since I posted anything. May 20th was mine and Jeannie’s 30th anniversary! We got up that day and took the train to Moreton-in- Marsh in the Cotswolds. They were having a huge outdoor market so we went exploring. Some of the salespeople were clever like the guys who looked like a middle eastern with a long beard and said, “Bin Laden is with the Taliban but I am the “towel man” – he was selling bath towels! When we got hungry we saw a lot of people coming out of a little fish & chips shop so Jeannie went in to investigate. They were frying fish and chips as fast as they could and then they wrap it up in several sheets of manila paper with lots of salt and malt vinegar. We got two and two drinks and went to sit down at the bus stop.
Riding a bus in the Cotswolds is an opportunity to increase your prayer life. The roads are narrow (think of Helen St. by our house and take off 2-3 feet). So when one bus meets another bus or a large truck, they really have to maneuver to get by. We went to another village called Chipping Campden. We walked around and explored the shops, a large church and saw the quintessential Cotswold scenes of old church, stone walls, ancient gravestones, and lots of sheep grazing on the hills. Lots of beautiful flowers and old buildings with the Cotswolds honey colored stone. We found out where the thatched roof homes were and walked to see them. There were many that were quite large with lovely gardens. We walked along a street called “Sheep Street” that had one very nice house for sale that we later saw was £1.25 million or about $2.5 million. I decided that those sheep farmers weren’t “pulling the wool over our eyes,” they must have “fleeced” a lot of people to be able to afford a home like that! (Sorry, a little sheep pun humor for ewe).
Our day ended with a lesson in trust and patience. As we waited for the bus to return from Chipping Campden to Moreton-in-Marsh we realized that we had looked at the schedule wrong and we either had to take a taxi back ($40) or wait for a later bus that would put us back only 10 minutes before our train was to leave. We decided to trust that God would allow us to make it back on the bus in time or He would work things out for a later train. Of course, God already knew that, 1) we would have Speed Racer as a bus driver, and 2) the train would be a few minutes late, which gave us plenty of time. We made it back to Oxford in time to eat dinner and get ready to leave the next day to go to Salzburg, Austria (this was the real 30th anniversary trip).Because we had to wait an extra two hours in a little town that we had already seen, we also learned a little about the value of waiting. Waiting allowed us to have some quality time together on our 30th anniversary to just talk and share. It reminded us both of the importance of learning to wait on God. Sometimes we read God’s schedule wrong (or more often try to put Him on our schedule) and so we end up waiting on God’s perfect timing. We can either wait patiently or impatiently. When we wait patiently, we can discover the value of using that time to deepen our relationship with God, to have extended conversations with Him so that, at the end, we value the waiting time instead of regretting it.