As a Yalie, you must wait to hear into which of the twelve residential colleges you've been sorted, you must wait until your arrival on campus to enroll, you must wait until your sophomore year before officially moving into your college, you must wait until 24 hours after the Pretty Little Liars summer finale to watch it on Hulu because you have a meeting with your master (not bitter....).
While I hate waiting (really, really hate it), I've come to realize that sometimes it is for my own good. A lot of this realization, I owe in part to one of my favorite authors. In one chapter of his book "Searching for God Knows What" Don Miller introduced me to a completely new perspective. In the midst story of creation, he points out something I had never noticed. I had always grown up with the belief that Adam and Eve were made within several minutes of each other. That God created Man, woke him up, put him back to sleep, and then came Eve. Feminists might argue that God created them at the same time, that the whole "rib thing" is yet another example of men trying to prove their inherent dominance; however, I don't agree with them and, frankly, I don't want to. As a romantic myself, Miller's take on creation appeals to me more than any other. He focuses in on Genesis 2, starting around verse 15:
15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
18 The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.
But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken out of man.”
Then, he emphasizes verse 20. Adam named every animal, mammals and birds and fish alike, BEFORE he was given Eve. Miller writes, "This was a man who, despite feeling a certain need for a companion, performed what must have been nearly one hundred years of work, naming and perhaps even categorizing the animals...and the entire time he could not imagine what a helpmate might look like, how a helpmate might talk, the ways in which a helpmate might think. The idea of another person had perhaps not even entered his mind...So here was this guy who was intensely relational, needing other people, and in order to cause him to appreciate the gift of companionship, God had him hang out with chimps for a hundred years. It's quite beautiful, really."
I had never considered the act of waiting to be beautiful before reading that. It was (is) a great relief to me, because I feel like a big, neon "PENDING" sign is the motif of my life right now. I look back on many instances, one very long one in particular, and see how God was using them to build a foundation. While they may seem inexplicable at the time, God gives us seasons of waiting to prepare us for blessings that await us ahead. While I'm almost certain that there isn't an Eve waiting at the end of this seemingly infinite line (no offense to her, of course), I am sure that there are a handful of lessons that I can take from it that will be a tad more helpful to me than a lovely woman extracted from my rib.
