“How do you wait well?” she asked. The question was posed in our writing group. She’d been waiting for weeks on news that would propel her life in one direction or another.

Goodness knows I’ve done my share of waiting. We all have. In fact, my gut tells me that there’s at least one big thing you’re waiting on right now and you know what it is to slog through weeks and months and even years of waiting.

Maybe it’s something you long for, maybe a good and even godly longing, but it has yet to happen.

Maybe it’s something you’ve prayed for — God tells us we have not because we ask not — so you’ve prayed and asked God to move or to remove, but it has yet to happen.

Maybe it’s something God called you to and you gulped down fear and stepped out in big faith, but now find yourself waiting because it has yet to happen.

And that wait is hard.

Waiting is its own brand of hard — different from the crisis of a health diagnosis or the gut-wrenching pain of loss or the practical kick that comes with financial problems.

But here’s the thing: waiting is meant to be hard.

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It’s been several weeks of back-to-back big issues. If hard things come in threes, I’ve been over limit.

First, we learned that while my daughter was on a mission trip in Brazil, Hurricane Michael wiped out her belongings in storage. On the heels of that, we had a health scare that sent us scurrying for tests and searching for answers. A different report came in raising concerns for one child at the same time I was walking another through heavy decisions. And that Saturday, as I was prepping to meet some friends, a pipe burst spewing water across the utility room into the kitchen before we could get the water turned off.

I stayed steady through the first couple of issues, handling each one as it came. But when they piled on, I began to buckle under their collective weight.

I’ve been a single mom for seven years, and I’ve grown more accustom to juggling all the things, to days with no margin and to making countless decisions on my own. When I stop to think about all of it, I realize again what an enormous task single parenting is. But who has time to stop and think about it?

And while I’ve learned these last seven years to take my need to God, the sheer weight of all these big issues together taxed every bit of my emotional reserves and maxed out my mental space. A girl can only hold so much before something gives.

And what gave out was my apparently my focus. I began to get scatterbrained. It wasn’t so bad when I left a roast and vegetables on the counter overnight.

But two days later, I lost some very important papers. This type-B girl had been so organized! I sorted them, used them for online forms and then – poof. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I did with them next.

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