Wait-for-it!

It’s getting towards the end of term now. Deadlines have come and gone, festivities are going on, and home-time is coming thick and fast. Yet I still have to wait. Daily. It’s currently day thirty-two since I sent my teacher training application off. They’re meant to respond within twenty-eight days but the GTTR was a bit of a fail-whale and there’s a backlog. I’m not freaking out, but I have been getting antsy. The email alert goes off and I’m on outlook like a fish to water. Still nothing though.

There is an irony behind this though. It’s advent. A time for waiting. A time for re-positioning your eyes to something else. And there I am seeing miniature envelopes everywhere I go. I have learnt something though. It’s okay to wait.

Waiting, whilst being a pain in so many ways, is also a positive thing. We wait for our birthdays. We wait for holidays. About two-thousand years ago, people were waiting for a saviour. The overlap of advent and my teacher training application has led to me generally being in a place of peace. Don’t get me wrong, I really want to get a response from the Institute of Education, but the waiting period has allowed me to focus on something that for me is much more important. I am trying to put the anxious waiting to one side, and in return excitedly wait for Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Jesus and what that means to Christians everywhere.

Waiting can be a distraction. Or, waiting can be a tool to refocus. Waiting can be controlling. Or, we can let go. In fact waiting itself is fairly neutral - it’s what you do with the wait that counts.