Always in Waiting

What is our human tendency to always feel like we are in a waiting zone for the next thing?!

Maybe I should speak for myself here. Presence is a continual discipline I try to live into – even sometimes to the point of achievement. I can’t seem to help myself from living plan to plan – next to next. I over-plan to my demise. I want to be sure that I am organizing my time with intentionality – with the people I love and the activities I enjoy, serving the city in which I live and meeting my neighbors who live in it. I have a fear my life will speed by to the abandonment of these intentions so that my influence in the world has fizzled to none.

I’m almost halfway through pregnancy right now, which given my barely-there bump feels like it could be a lie. In pregnancy, you naturally live week-by-week – tracking the fetal development of the baby and dreaming about when he arrives. At the same time, these last 5 precious months are the last of my life to have Ben to myself (which I continually remind him with my ongoing complaint of never ever being able to sleep-in again in my entire life…). I want to know that I am living these months to the fullest – doing everything now that I won’t be able to do when the baby arrives. While at the same time, I’m not quite sure what these things actually are?

It feels like a waiting zone – an in-between – a here-but-not-yet type of life, metaphorical of the walk of a Christian. How do I know that we are doing everything we can now that we can’t do later?! We go to date nights and movie nights and back-to-back MX weekends… Is there something else we are missing? Will it be possible to bring a baby in tow or will we just be the No-People from June forward?

It seems like this year is divided in half – with the first half the life we live now, the life we know and love and can predict. Then in July, we enter the second half – the foreign and unclear and unstoppable changes type of life. It seems that everything will be different when that line is drawn – but the differences are the ones I can’t completely account for now. In my planned out world, this feels scary. But it also feels exciting. It feels like a new challenge I get to discover – one that I get to overcome and might even possibly enjoy.