Biding My Time

From August of '07:

To bide one's time is to wait patiently for an opportunity, so says Webster. The title of my blog came to me this morning as I thought through my upcoming year and the hint of wonderful new opportunities awaiting me.

I am not sure how consistently patient I have been, but for the past 16 years I have been biding my time. Please don't misunderstand me...I have enjoyed and loved being right where I was meant to be! The past decade and a half have been a whole series of opportunities! But starting this September I will have reached a serious milestone. I will not have a child in my home during the school day. I won't need to formulate, and then re-formulate lesson plans and field trips. I won't have to drag them with me on errands. I will have literally hours during the day that are kid-less.

I have to admit I have a strange mix of elation and apprehension at the opportunities that are just around the corner.

Do I get a job to earn some extra cash? Do I up my volunteer work at the church, and if so, in which capacity? How about the kids schools? The community? Do I actually become a conscientious housekeeper? Do I expand my culinary "efforts"? Do I start watching HGTV? Do I join the gym? Do I start to blog?

Thankfully, I am not at this milestone alone. I am reassured by Scripture that God has created me with a specific plan in mind and already has good works set out for me to do for His Glory. I commit here and now to patiently wait for Him to show me what those new opportunities are and to lean on Him for the accomplishment of them. I also have a loving and faithful husband who is looking forward to this new phase of life and encouraging me to embrace it. And I have some fun friends who are just a speed-dial or a blog away who share like interests and issues.

Reality is that this is just one milestone in my life. There are lots more ahead of me, which means lots of future opportunities opening up. Very exciting stuff!

Thanks for walking with me as I continue to bide my time.

This was written almost three years ago. Since that time lots of new opportunities have been set before me, big and small, but none of those opportunities have prevented me from blogging on a fairly regular basis...until now.

In January of this year, a couple friends and I launched a new ministry, for women within our church walls and out, that involves a weekly blog and a daily devotional (www.giventhetime.wordpress.com). Needless to say, my computer time has greatly increased and I find that I need to take a sabbatical from my personal blog.

I am so thankful for the almost 3 years of writing experience Biding My Time has given me. I have been forced to be creative when I didn't feel particularly so, I have learned to edit, and I have improved my writing skills. And it has been a lot of fun! But I am also excited that I am smack dab in the middle of one of those mysterious opportunities that I knew God had prepared for me way back then in '07. What a ride!!

Ride out the storm

In the Colorado mountains on a camping trip as a teenager, a storm blew in quickly and without warning before my family even had the chance to finish setting up camp. There was no alternative but for us to huddle up under the best cover we could find and wait it out. There is a sense of power in a storm like that...it renders you completely helpless for that period of time. And it is somewhat terrifying.

I am not sure what made me remember that incident so many years ago. I don't think I am facing anything monumental at the moment...and maybe therein lies my answer...nothing at the moment. There are so many storms that blow into our lives unexpectedly and the sheer force of the storm threatens to paralyze us from moving forward, or even backward for that matter. I guess the key is to ride out the storm to the best of our ability so that eventually we can go about moving forward once again.

Editing note: I don't mean to sound fatalistic...more along the lines of realistic. What I didn't say above, and I should, is that even as I wait out any storm that may cross my path, I am not doing it alone or without hope. There isn't a storm out there that separates me from the love and care of the Lord. But there are times and seasons that we are held in place and stationary until the point comes we are able to move forward. All the while, even as we ride out the storm, God shelters us in His loving care.

Signs of the Times

Signs he isn't my baby boy any more:

*He is designing a tattoo for himself. He knows he can't get one while we are still "footing the bill", which puts it into the later-rather-than-sooner time frame for him, but he is 18 and about to launch into the big world of college and he wants a tat. So he is planning it all out. A cross, with a verse, over the span of his nice broad shoulders. (I would do it all for him in black sharpie, and for free. But he isn't amused for some reason.)

*He is worried about paying back his future college loans.(Join the club!)

*He cleaned and washed his car without us telling him to. (And found a pair of jeans he thought he had lost. Bonus!)

Just feels like signs of the times, that the day is growing closer when he will be away much more than he is with us. So I am preparing my heart...or trying to anyways. I don't want to hold him back, but I don't want to let go too much either. Kind of feeling my way through these emotions that this new stage of life is bringing to me.

Bad News for Dublin

Hidey has a better memory than he does.

I read somewhere that the University of Michigan has tested the memories of dogs and cats and came to the conclusion that a dogs memory extends to about 5 minutes and a cat's memory will potentially last as long as 16 hours. This exceeds even that of monkeys and orangutans.

What really concerns me, though, is that Hidey might have a better memory than me as well. I swore it wouldn't happen to me, and certainly not before I turned 40, but I am having the hardest time lately remembering little details lately, like names of people I am friends with and things I went in the other room for. A friend was real comforting to me when she nodded knowingly and said the exact same thing happened to her when she turned 40, and it does get better...and then she wished me a Merry Christmas. Haha! Real funny!