The Adoption Agency Email I Refresh My Inbox Every Four Minutes Waiting For
The Adoption Agency Email I Refresh My Inbox Every Four Minutes Waiting For
My wife and I submitted our home study update to the agency eleven days ago, the last document standing between us and a phone call that could change which child's face we finally get to learn. I have refreshed my email so many times this week that my thumb now does it without my mind giving the order, standing in line at the hardware store, sitting through a sermon I should have been listening to instead, lying in bed at one in the morning telling myself this refresh will be the last one tonight. Nothing ever comes. The agency told us these things take weeks, sometimes longer, and I nodded like a reasonable man who understood that completely. My thumb apparently did not get the memo.
I am eleven years sober, and for most of those years I assumed impatience was a smaller sin than the ones that nearly killed me, something closer to a bad habit than a real spiritual problem worth confessing. This waiting has corrected that assumption fast. I have caught myself irritable with my wife over nothing, short with a coworker who asked a simple question twice, awake at hours I used to reserve for far worse things than checking an inbox. The waiting itself is not the sin. What I do while I wait, the gnawing and grasping and refusing to set the phone down, that is where I keep finding the old man I thought I had mostly buried.
Scripture does not treat waiting as a weakness a mature believer eventually outgrows. It treats it as the actual terrain of faith, the place where faith either grows or reveals it was never there to begin with. The prophet Habakkuk stood on a watchtower demanding an answer from God about injustice he could not make sense of, and God's reply was not the answer Habakkuk wanted. It was an instruction to keep standing there. "For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry" (Habakkuk 2:3, NKJV). Appointed time, not my time. I have been treating eleven days like an unreasonable delay instead of what it probably is, a timeline I was never given authority to set.
James goes further and names what my impatience has actually been missing this whole week, which is not information but posture. "Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand" (James 5:7-8, NKJV). A farmer does not stand over his field pulling at the stalks to hurry them along. He has learned that some things only finish growing in the dark, underground, where he cannot see them and has no business interfering. David said something similar from a season of his own waiting that had far higher stakes than mine. "Wait on the LORD; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the LORD!" (Psalm 27:14, NKJV). He repeats the instruction because once was clearly not going to be enough for him either.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten me to put my phone down for good. I can tell myself accurately that the agency is not lying to us, that paperwork genuinely moves slower than any of us would like, that worrying about an email has never once made it arrive sooner. Every sentence is true, and none of it has quieted my thumb, because impatience was never actually a facts problem waiting on better information. It is a trust problem, and no amount of correct thinking has ever manufactured the trust by itself. Isaiah names the actual gap I keep running into, the real reason my own reasoning stalls out here. "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways," says the LORD. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9, NKJV). I am not failing to be patient because I am weak. I am failing because I keep trying to out-think a plan I was never given the full blueprint for.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that eleven years of disciplined living could never finish producing on its own. Paul does not tell the Philippians to simply stop being anxious through sheer effort. He tells them what to do instead, and promises something no effort of mine has ever once produced. "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:6-7, NKJV). Surpasses all understanding. That peace was never going to arrive by my understanding finally catching up to the timeline. It arrives instead of understanding, standing guard over a heart that still, honestly, does not know when that email is coming. Peter adds the one piece I most needed this week, a reminder that God's slowness is never the same thing as God's absence. "But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:8-9, NKJV). Eleven days is nothing on that scale. It only feels like everything because I am the one living inside it.
I put my phone in the kitchen drawer last night instead of on my nightstand, not because the ache to check it disappeared, but because I finally let the Spirit hold the waiting instead of my thumb. The email still has not come as I write this. God is alive this morning, and He already knows exactly which inbox you keep refreshing, which appointed time feels impossibly late to you right now. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on your patience running out first, and He has promised a peace that will guard you long before the news you are waiting on ever arrives. He will never leave you alone with that phone in your hand.
Scriptures used (NKJV): Habakkuk 2:3; James 5:7-8; Psalm 27:14; Isaiah 55:8-9; Philippians 4:6-7; 2 Peter 3:8-9.
My wife and I submitted our home study update to the agency eleven days ago, the last document standing between us and a phone call that could change which child's face we finally get to learn. I have refreshed my email so many times this week that my thumb now does it without my mind giving the order, standing in line at the hardware store, sitting through a sermon I should have been listening to instead, lying in bed at one in the morning telling myself this refresh will be the last one tonight. Nothing ever comes. The agency told us these things take weeks, sometimes longer, and I nodded like a reasonable man who understood that completely. My thumb apparently did not get the memo.
I am eleven years sober, and for most of those years I assumed impatience was a smaller sin than the ones that nearly killed me, something closer to a bad habit than a real spiritual problem worth confessing. This waiting has corrected that assumption fast. I have caught myself irritable with my wife over nothing, short with a coworker who asked a simple question twice, awake at hours I used to reserve for far worse things than checking an inbox. The waiting itself is not the sin. What I do while I wait, the gnawing and grasping and refusing to set the phone down, that is where I keep finding the old man I thought I had mostly buried.
Scripture does not treat waiting as a weakness a mature believer eventually outgrows. It treats it as the actual terrain of faith, the place where faith either grows or reveals it was never there to begin with. The prophet Habakkuk stood on a watchtower demanding an answer from God about injustice he could not make sense of, and God's reply was not the answer Habakkuk wanted. It was an instruction to keep standing there. "For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry" (Habakkuk 2:3, NKJV). Appointed time, not my time. I have been treating eleven days like an unreasonable delay instead of what it probably is, a timeline I was never given authority to set.
James goes further and names what my impatience has actually been missing this whole week, which is not information but posture. "Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand" (James 5:7-8, NKJV). A farmer does not stand over his field pulling at the stalks to hurry them along. He has learned that some things only finish growing in the dark, underground, where he cannot see them and has no business interfering. David said something similar from a season of his own waiting that had far higher stakes than mine. "Wait on the LORD; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the LORD!" (Psalm 27:14, NKJV). He repeats the instruction because once was clearly not going to be enough for him either.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten me to put my phone down for good. I can tell myself accurately that the agency is not lying to us, that paperwork genuinely moves slower than any of us would like, that worrying about an email has never once made it arrive sooner. Every sentence is true, and none of it has quieted my thumb, because impatience was never actually a facts problem waiting on better information. It is a trust problem, and no amount of correct thinking has ever manufactured the trust by itself. Isaiah names the actual gap I keep running into, the real reason my own reasoning stalls out here. "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways," says the LORD. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9, NKJV). I am not failing to be patient because I am weak. I am failing because I keep trying to out-think a plan I was never given the full blueprint for.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that eleven years of disciplined living could never finish producing on its own. Paul does not tell the Philippians to simply stop being anxious through sheer effort. He tells them what to do instead, and promises something no effort of mine has ever once produced. "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:6-7, NKJV). Surpasses all understanding. That peace was never going to arrive by my understanding finally catching up to the timeline. It arrives instead of understanding, standing guard over a heart that still, honestly, does not know when that email is coming. Peter adds the one piece I most needed this week, a reminder that God's slowness is never the same thing as God's absence. "But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:8-9, NKJV). Eleven days is nothing on that scale. It only feels like everything because I am the one living inside it.
I put my phone in the kitchen drawer last night instead of on my nightstand, not because the ache to check it disappeared, but because I finally let the Spirit hold the waiting instead of my thumb. The email still has not come as I write this. God is alive this morning, and He already knows exactly which inbox you keep refreshing, which appointed time feels impossibly late to you right now. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on your patience running out first, and He has promised a peace that will guard you long before the news you are waiting on ever arrives. He will never leave you alone with that phone in your hand.
Scriptures used (NKJV): Habakkuk 2:3; James 5:7-8; Psalm 27:14; Isaiah 55:8-9; Philippians 4:6-7; 2 Peter 3:8-9.
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