Stay For A While

It’s snowing outside right now – a wet snow that’s not quite ready to stick. Outside my living room window, fluffy flakes sweep past power lines and a parking garage. It all feels familiar.

I walk to the train in my winter coat, blanket scarf wrapped around my neck. It’s cold, not yet unbearably so, but I raise my hood to shield my eyes and board the Brown Line to Lincoln Square. Exiting at Roscoe, a walk down two neighborhood streets takes me to a friend’s house, and this, too, feels familiar.

Next Thursday, I’ll celebrate Thanksgiving. On Friday, I’ll head to Home Depot with Dan to buy our fourth married-couple Christmas tree. The checkout clerk will wrap it up in that wirey mesh stuff, then we’ll carry it down the sidewalk, a whole mile! back to our apartment because we don’t have a car, and even if we did, city life says that sometimes, walking is just plain easier.

We’ll hang ornaments and stockings and wrap the tree in lights, and all the while this, too, will feel familiar.

I used to fear familiar. I used to fear that sameness that felt like no progress because I’m a “let’s-keep-it-going!” kind of girl.

But something shifted in me through the non-stop growth I’ve experienced these last few years. Something has pulled me to my seat and asked me to stay for a while.

There’s a holiness to waiting, a choosing to sit still so your Heavenly Father can feed you for a while – rocking back and forth like a baby in my heavenly mother’s arms for a while. If that baby just kept playing all day every day, she would cease to grow. Important things happen when babies rest for a while, sleep for a while, stay for a while.

Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.

There is faith to be had in the waiting, and a gratitude that can only grow when we’re still enough to see the gifts that have been placed around us.

So today, I will wait. I will sit and I will be glad. I have a house that is a home, and I can lay my head down on a pillow-covered couch any time it’s snowy and cold outside. I am loved beyond words by a man who comes home every day and greets me with a happy “hi!” Before heading to our room to read. I have parents who call me and a body that can breath. A church that has shaped me, and a voice that can sing. I have friends that I cherish and good coffee down the street.

I dwell on the things I don’t yet have, places where I want to go and people I long to reach. But if I don’t stop and stay for a while, I’ll miss the snow that hangs softly on the trees, that little kid laugh, and that pumpkin ice cream treat.

Stay for a while.
Sit for a while.
Rest for a while.

Don’t rush forward just yet! Be glad in the things that God will some day do, but just for a moment, sit….simmer…..soak in the goodness he’s already done in you.