Wasteland of Impatience

"It's in the waiting that God prepares for our dreams to come true."

That was a quote from a sermon I heard with the title above. I thought both the title and the quote were really great. They came from a the pastor of a college/young adult service in Virginia near DC.

Their college/young adult service was started the same year as ours, but theirs is now over 1,500 weekly attendance and ours is less than 100, nine years later. They both meet at the same time, Sunday nights, and theirs has the added benefit of sometimes being held or not held because of temperatures below freezing and/or blizzards. The pastor who started that service was originally from a big church south of us here in L.A. and only took that job after a lot of prodding and calls from the church back east. He's now back in the southland at another church where he's the senior pastor. The guy who retired from being that church's senior pastor is now our church's weekend teaching pastor while we look for a new senior pastor. Small world, eh?

Anyhow, all this has made me think of the logic puzzle with the nine dots arranged in three rows of three dots. You're supposed to draw four straight lines, without lifting the pen, and cover all nine dots. If we just stare at the dots, it's impossible. But if we think outside the square, suddenly the answer becomes very clear.

It feels like the impatience has come to an end, that we're now rushing madly towards something. It's like we were shown the box, and then it was poured out from the top of the Space Needle. All the pieces are there, but the task of getting them all togther seems both daunting, scary and nearly impossible.

I know for my part, I have not been working hard enough. It's been really stressful and I've taken breaks when I could have been working on it. I'm worried that I'm not good enough and my failure is what's going to keep it from all coming together. Not to mention that we're trying to squeeze the contents of a 1,100 square foot home into much smaller amounts of space as we clear rooms to have flooring done or redone. And everyone else is sick. It's all very draining.