Waiting

Life is…Waiting

My grandma told me a beautiful, true story about waiting, perseverance, and entrusting others. Aren’t all stories about waiting beautiful after the fact? We love stories about waiting and perseverance…Abraham and Sarah who waited 25 years for God’s promise of a son. Abraham Lincoln who became President after 11 setbacks, but I don’t want to wait for amazing things to happen in my life.
Right before Christmas my grandma had a children’s book she had written & illustrated over 50 years ago published. It is truly an answer to prayer to see it being sold on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, in the U.S., India, and the UK. The story of my grandma trying and hoping to get the book published is similar to her book The Lucky Penny. You see a penny goes on a “waiting adventure”: just going through a “normal penny life” until…well, I won’t ruin the end for you, but it has a special mission.
Isn’t that how we feel: just going through life, waiting, trying, failing, trying to do something important, and sometimes after a long time we see “the fruit of our labor”.
So, on to my story. One quiet night Grandma wrote The Lucky Penny. When she showed it to a few people she didn’t get an encouraging response, but she still felt it was good, so she called a publishing company. The man met her, read her book, and liked it, but $300 was needed to publish it, which they didn’t have. Still not wanting to give up she asked her father for a loan. Denied. Feeling frustrated and overwhelmed she put the book on a shelf where it stayed for decades until my cousin saw it and encouraged her to copy it for the family and a few friends. Not receiving a response she felt discouraged again. It went back on the shelf until a few years ago when Chris and I started the publishing process.

This story is so much like the story she wrote years ago, and so much like our lives. We are excited, we fail, we’re encouraged, we try again, we get “put on a shelf”, we fail, we succeed. I think it was worth the wait, but then again, it wasn’t me waiting in this story. Though we never see the whole picture I hope you can see part of the puzzle fit together in your life, even if it’s just one part.
“Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what is still possible for you to do.” ~Pope John XXIII
https://www.amazon.com/Lucky-Penny-Shirley-Redenius/dp/1505284163
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-lucky-penny-shirley-redenius/1125337179