A Lesson in the Waiting

Sunset on a Busy Highway, Cebu City (June 3, 2019). Photograph by Genrose Campasas

    Back in 2019, I was a working student at a university. The school was more than an hour away from home, and every day I had to travel early, walking out to the highway, hoping to find a tricycle, a bus, or whatever ride was available. Sometimes it took one ride. Other times, it took three. The degree I was pursuing was not easy for me. It demanded long study hours and a kind of focus that exhaustion made harder to give. I also worked for the same school, which helped financially, but it stretched my days even more. My tasks were light, thankfully, but my time was rarely free. There were weeks when I barely had sleep, and for three nights in a row, I would manage only two or three hours. My days were spent on campus (six days a week, morning to evening), and even before class began, I was already tired.

    There were mornings when I wished I had risen earlier, but sleep felt like something I needed just to survive. The pressure to perform well and to stay alert during lectures was already enough to weigh me down. And when the day ended, the long wait to get a ride home made it feel longer still.

    There were days when I stood at the roadside longer than I sat in class. Mornings would break too soon, and I would try to catch a little more sleep, just enough to steady myself for the day ahead. My body was tired, and my thoughts were often preoccupied with assignments, deadlines, and how to get from one place to another without losing more time.

    It would have been easy to grumble. Perhaps I often did, inwardly, without knowing I was. But now I look back and wonder if those long waits were not wasted after all. They may have become altars of patience, lessons without a classroom.

    The Bible is not unfamiliar with waiting. Israel waited for the Promised Land. David waited to become king. Even the faithful in Hebrews 11 “died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off” (Heb 11:13, NKJV). God’s people have always walked paths where they could not speed up the process.

    Perhaps those crowded streets and slow-moving queues were not just interruptions to our plans, but invitations to trust the God who sees even the slow steps. He was not only at the finish line of our deadlines but also in the hushed minutes by the highway, when we did not know how long the wait would be. Maybe He still is.

    If you, dear reader, find yourself in a long wait, be it for a ride, a job, a healing, or a breakthrough, we may take heart in this: delays are not wasted when they make us depend more on the One who governs time. He does not explain every pause, but He never overlooks it.

“To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1 (NKJV).