Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.   James 4:14

We spend a lot of time waiting.

Waiting on babies to be born and Amazon packages to be delivered. We wait for lab results and we wait in line at the grocery store. We wait to get in some places and to get out of others. We wait at traffic lights, at sporting events, and we wait on hold… a lot.

We wait for colder weather to arrive and for our hair to grow out from a bad cut. We wait for our kids to be potty-trained, then for them to get a job. We wait for Pumpkin Spice whatever to come out at Starbucks and we wait for the election to finally be over.

Much of our waiting is necessary and simply a consequence of being human and wanting and needing the same things that a bunch of other humans want or need at the same time.

But wait a minute. 😉

What about all our self-imposed waiting? The waiting that we choose?

The waiting until we get our swimsuit body to hop in the pool? The waiting until we get a bigger, nicer house to invite friends over for dinner. We leave our good dishes in the hutch, waiting until we have “people” over while we serve our families on paper plates. We wait to remodel our homes until we’re ready to sell them, and we turn down that dinner invitation from the new people at church because we’re waiting for someone “more like us” to become friends with.

We wait until we’re older, until the kids have graduated, until we have more money or a better house, then we wait until we retire.

So much waiting.

And day by day and moment by moment in all the waiting, our earthly stories are still be written. The stories that for some of us are deep into the storyline and maybe even close to the conclusion. Entire chapters hollow with nothing but waiting.

And while we’ll always wait on the UPS guy or for our self-cut bangs to grow out, let’s fill the chapters we can with living and doing and loving and celebrating!

Let’s feed our family hotdogs on the best china we have and rip out that gray carpet in the master bathroom so we can relish the feel of new tile on our bare feet instead of saving that pleasure for the buyers. Let’s squeeze our permanently non-summer bodies into the cutest swimsuit we can find and challenge the grandkids to a race across the pool. Let’s invite the neighbors over and entertain them on the patio furniture we’ve had for 27 years and laugh about the two cushions that the dog chewed up.

We have but one opportunity to co-author our earthly story- let’s give it all we’ve got.

Yours might just be a real page-turner.