WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART OF LIFE

One of the most maddening sights on a person's PC or smart device is the buffering image. Round and round it goes and when it stops, no one knows. We end up doing a lot of waiting in life too. Sometimes it's worth it and sometimes it isn't.

As a child, I hated shopping with Mom. She'd be looking at all sorts of adult stuff as my siblings and I fidgeted. All we wanted was to get out of the store and go home but Mom was too preoccupied with dishes and vases to care.

Dad made me wait a lot as well. Being an alcoholic, he left me in the Volkswagen behind the hotel while he sat in the bar with his friends. Time hung heavily since I had nothing to play with. It seemed like hours to me as Dad enjoyed himself while I felt so bored. I also knew what would happen if I left the car. I did that once when it was after curfew and the police drove me and my siblings home. My parents had to go to court as a result.

Then I had to wait three agonizing months before I could leave the school for the blind for the Christmas holidays. There was no mainstreaming of students back then so I had to go to that horrid institution. Worse yet, I was making progress in the first grade of public school before some bureaucrat coerced my parents into exiling me five-hundred miles from home.

When I was mainstreamed into the public school for grade eight, I had to board at various homes in Edmonton, about twenty miles from where my parents lived. I could go home on weekends but it still meant I had to wait to go home.

Once I became an adult, I found that I had to wait for all sorts of things. Waiting for a bus when the temperature was minus thirty was no fun at all, especially when that route was on hourly service only. Waiting to get my first pay cheque was equally painful as I was practically out of money. Then there were those dental and doctor appointments which I had to endure. I'd come on time or early, yet I'd have to wait.

I remember how long it used to take for radios and TVs with vacuum tubes to warm up. When transistor radios became popular, the big boast was that they would turn on instantly. Manufacturers also used to brag about their "instant on" TVs but they really just kept the tube filaments lit.

Now we have computers that take a few minutes to get their acts together. Though I've removed many programs from the start menu with the MSCONFIG tool, my PC still takes time to set everything up for my use.

I'm also doing my best to wait for a special event. All my life, people told me about how Christ would return. Some said he'd whisk us off to heaven while the world went to hell. When that kept not happening, I became frustrated with the delay. Now I know that the Bible teaches that Christ will appear again in the same way he left our world. He wants as many people as will repent to surrender to him. I now content myself with that knowledge. I no longer watch for signs and events as I once did.

I wrote about my struggle with what errant elders taught me in How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity. Check out my story of God's wondrous providence at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell's Books.