I remember the crisp, fall afternoon like it was yesterday. With about a year’s worth of God-following under my belt, I was proudly sharing about my newfound faith with a man I’d looked-up to for a long time. Even as a less than religious teenager, I’d always admired when this former teacher and coach told me, “Wait for it, Abbie. That is of the best gifts you can offer God and yourself and the man you marry. Be patient,” he’d say. The theological reasoning here wasn’t the compelling part, but rather, it was this man’s pursuit of something worth living for, or waiting for. In a matter of moments, however, my stained glass window of him shattered.

I giddily explained how I understood and agreed with his thoughts on “waiting” now, and that such abstinence had actually grown as something of an endearment to me. He didn’t respond much at first, but stared at me with this drawn-out, almost condescending grin. It was like my nineteen-year-old passion had been squashed into the conscience of a nine-month-old who spilled her milk. Without any words being communicated, I felt like I’d done something wrong, or stupid, or worth punishment? It was like I’d just shared the stupidest idea on earth? But wait a minute, this was the man who encouraged me, and drew me, in so many ways, toward the idea of waiting for sex until marriage?

“Oh Abbie, college has you where it’s meant to. I was like you for so long, too, thinking God must have a plan for my life and I was to wait on that one special woman. But I guess something of a reality-check hit me when I turned 30. I couldn’t wait anymore, or maybe just didn’t wanna wait anymore. God obviously didn’t care about my desires, or else he would’ve brought me a wife. I finally gave-up on Him and decided to face my current situation by myself. He can tag-along if He wants, but life’s too short to keep playing the waiting game.”

This crushed me on a number of fronts, because it crushed my normal. And not only that, it crushed the admired state my normal was striving for. C.S. Lewis said reality is iconoclastic, meaning reality needs space to rebuild itself, continually refreshing its’ icons. The ways and wavelengths of reality get blurry, and lines get blurred over and tired of waiting, so we fall privy to creating our own. My most forthright inner dialogues are usually about waiting—angry that I have to keep waiting. I need ___, God, or am entitled to ____, and shouldn’t have to wait. And when I take it a step further, I realize much of me prefers the fantasy. I’d rather have secure, easy, around-the-clock interaction with Eros, than this vacancy. I want the honeymoon. I want feeling-based love and don’t care if it’s an illusion; even a temporarily lure from the literal sounds lovely. I want lots of maids and margaritas and sex on warm sand. I want pleasure. I want flirting and feasts, with no morning after. Bottom line, waiting is hard, and maintaining hope in waiting is harder, no matter how strong my beliefs. Waiting is one thing; waiting well seems like an entirely other.

So much of waiting seems to be about trust and so much of trust seems to be about waiting and so much of waiting about faith. It’s easy to credit God when the wait sees pleasant results, but when you start dishing me more waiting, or any amount of suffering, I’ll start to question. Her lawn will look a whole lot greener, and the grace on mine a whole lot smaller. I’m not getting what I wanted, so I tell God off and take plans in my own hands. Because in the words of Henri Nouwen, “It’s easier to be God, than to love God.”

Women seem to settle because, “What if no one else comes along?” While men jump-ship because, “What if another does?” There’s a crowd of us who needs to lighten-up at times, realizing casual dinner with someone of the opposite sex isn’t gonna kill us—or cause us to settle eternally. But there’s a larger crowd of us, I think, who needs to step-up our standards and realize we have worth. Casual anything creates habituations. Thus casual phrases like, “if I don’t like him, we’ll just break-up,” roll seamlessly into, “if it doesn’t work, we’ll just get divorced.” Settling isn’t the core issue—deficiency of our hearts is. We were made for more. We made for more than we can now have, or have the capacity to have. We were made for unblemished intimacy and the nourishments of gourmet. But we settle for crumbs. We settle for less because we’re bored by waiting and discontent by our lot. Boredom causes that we’re unable to enjoy our selves and discontent says we should be somewhere else by now—or should’ve become someone else by this point in our lives.

What if God really knew what He was doing? What if He didn’t need our pending plans, or stunted dreams, to make His happen? What if love really never failed and truly came first , and followed after …was quick to forgive and quicker to unleash mercy? What if Love’s ways were always creating, restoring and searching for ways to capture us anew—especially that which feels dead and broken? What if God knew what He was doing, even in the midst of suffering ? What if He was precisely at work , even, and maybe especially, in our silent caverns of waiting?