This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Rebecca Brewster Stevenson will be awarding a $15 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
Everyone has endured the endless traffic light, the queue that goes nowhere, the elevator music piped through the phone line. But what of those periods in your life when everything seems on hold? When you can't do the next thing in your professional or personal life because you can't get to it?
Waiting—be it for health, a life partner, a child, a job—can be an agony. The persistently unrealized goal feels like an endless road. And hope's constant deferment can be exhausting. A firm answer against the thing you're hoping for—"no"—might be easier than this constant lack of closure. It might be easier to give it up.
But what if waiting means to be something else? Waiting doesn't have to mean idleness. Our prolonged state of need might teach us to look beyond the desired goal to something infinitely better. We find lessons on this throughout the Bible and, if we are paying attention, in our own lives.
Rather than fostering frustration, periods of waiting might have great truths to tell us. It might show us that hope is worthwhile. Waiting might even be a gift in and of itself.
If you have asked God for something, and he has not said "yes," or "no," if you are among the loved ones enduring his seeming silence because he has asked you to wait, if you are standing on a proverbial sideline or platform somewhere, then I am asking you to shift your gaze. Don't look at the game. Don't squint at the stick. And don't think for a minute that, just because I ask you to shift your gaze, that the thing you are gazing at--the thing you want and are waiting for--is bad. It's not. But there is something to be gleaned from the sideline itself--and this is what we must attend to. You are on the outside, looking in. But look around you. Everyone is on the outside, and this has been true from almost the very beginning.
Before dedicating herself to writing full time, Rebecca worked with Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill to develop the curriculum for their humanities department; she also worked as an English teacher at public and private middle and high schools in Durham and Pittsburgh. Rebecca's debut novel Healing Maddie Brees was published in 2016 to literary acclaim. Her beautifully crafted personal essays on her blog "Small Hours" have earned her a strong audience of readers who enjoy her explorations of themes relating to family, marriage, faith, writing, language, literature, and film.
"Rebecca Brewster Stevenson's writing is consistently powerful, complex, honest, and hopeful" (Andy Crouch, author, Culture Making and The Tech-Wise Family). Rebecca's writing has also been called "exquisite" (Stephen Chbosky), "thought-provoking" (Barbara Claypole White), and "gorgeous" (Kirkus Reviews).
Website: https://rebeccabrewsterstevenson.com
Blog: https://rebeccabrewsterstevenson.com/blog/
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Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for hosting me and my book today!
ReplyDeleteWhat has influenced your writing the most?
ReplyDeleteWhat an excellent question! I think reading good books has been the greatest influence: I see how a really great book impacts and moves me, and I want to try to create a similar impact, I think. Are you a writer?
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