Growth through waiting

I have recently planted potatoes in my garden. Now that I have a gardener to help with the mowing and weeding on a regular basis and can actually see the soil on the borders, I have been able to plant the seed potatoes given to me by a friend a few weeks ago. Yesterday I noticed to my excitement that green shoots have sprouted: something is definitely going on underneath the soil! They are, however, not going to be ready for a little while, and I am going to have to wait to unearth them and enjoy (hopefully!) the product of the planting, cultivating and waiting, however much I would like them to be ready to eat now. They need time, and I need patience!

Waiting for the potatoes to be ready to eat; waiting in a queue at the shops; waiting for the holidays when you can finally have a bit of a break; waiting for a change in circumstances or situation. How good are you at waiting? It could be said that waiting in the queue at the supermarket is a great deal easier than waiting for, say, a change that would seemingly have a much larger impact on our lives or the lives of others.

Waiting may not be that difficult, or it may be very challenging, or somewhere in-between. Whatever one is waiting for, the waiting itself can either be a positive, exciting, challenging or frustrating experience, or a mixture of some or all of these. The extent to which one might feel these different effects may depend upon many factors, such as how long one might have to wait, the extent to which one can influence the waiting, and the difference that not waiting anymore will make to life.

And perhaps, most importantly, the attitude with which we approach the waiting will affect our experience of it the most.

Waiting for something that we would like to happen, particularly if we have little idea of when it might, can be very difficult, and it is easy to focus on the frustrations and challenges of this. However, some waiting can involve an important time of transition and preparation, and a time of opportunity for growth, even if this is difficult to see at the time.

At the moment, I am waiting for something; I am waiting to go back to interviews for selection to ordained ministry. When I was first told that I would need to wait for at least two years to do this after my last series of interviews, I felt disappointed and frustrated. As time has gone on, however, I can see how much this time of waiting has presented an opportunity for time for me to grow and develop.

I have recently subscribed to “Reflections”, a series of daily reflections on a Bible reading written by various individuals. Earlier this year, Martyn Percy wrote some thought-provoking passages about how we might understand the process of waiting. He writes, "wait for God’s good time. Try and see history and destiny through God’s eyes, not ours….We have to wait for God’s goodness and completeness to gestate; for he surely feeds us even when we struggle to see the manna in his hand."

We can learn much about ourselves during times of waiting, and it can be a time to be fed and nurtured so that we can grow in the best way possible. And when the waiting appears to be over, we continue to be fed and nurtured by God so that we are constantly growing to become the people that He wants us to be.

Creating space

My three sons aren't particularly into football. They enjoy kicking a ball around in the courtyard outside our house, but just as happily play with their skateboards and scooters. They quite often play football at school, they tell me, although this is apparently as much to do with the fact that so few boys are not into football that there would hardly be anyone to play with if they did not join in with them, as it is to do with wanting to play the game itself.


In some ways, I have found this surprising; as they have got older, I have been half expecting to have requests to go and see football matches and to watch it on TV (and have braced myself for such a possibility :-)). There is often an assumption that boys will be into certain things, and football is one of those things.

Assumptions about what children will find interesting are commonplace, and these are often gender-specific. There is some truth in such assumptions; child development research shows that from a young age boys and girls show general differences in the way that they play, and the type of toys that they prefer to play with if given the choice.


What is important, though, is that such assumptions, gender or otherwise, do not restrict children (and thankfully my sons' school offers a variety of actvities for children to partake in during school time on certain days of the week). Children should be given the opportunities to grow and develop and to be nurtured as individuals; to be given the chance to explore and discover who they are without limitations placed upon them caused by assumptions. This can be applied not just to what and how they play in the playground, but to how they experience worship, too.

For the last few years, I have been helping with the Sunday School at church and have recently taken a more active role in the planning of sessions. Many of the activities that I planned during the sessions involved the chance for the children to do crafts and to be physically active; to do lots of singing and to be engaged in a very action-orientated way. I know from my teaching experience that actively engaging children is a very effective way for them to learn and to have fun, rather than them experiencing a mainly didactic approach involving the teacher at the front and them as passive recipients. I also know that children like to make a noise and like to make a mess, and there was plenty of that, too.

And then my assumptions were challenged, in a very gentle and quiet way. I went along to a Prayer Spaces day which was organised to show the different ways in which spaces can be created to give children the chance to reflect upon things that matter to them and to pray.  Although the initiative was founded to create spaces for children in schools, there is no reason why the ideas cannot be used in other settings, including Sunday School. The ideas were creative, but there was an inherent stillness as part of them, allowing children the room to think and reflect, to still their minds and be open to thought and prayer. I felt humbled as I read about the children's thoughts about the prayer spaces and what it meant to them to experience this, and wanted to give the small group of children to whom I minister the opportunity to have this type of space as part of what we do.

During my next session leading Sunday School, I asked the children how they liked to pray. One child put up his hand and said "I like to wave my arms around and sing!" and another child put up his hand and said "I like to close my eyes and put my hands together and be really quiet." Here in their answers was an illustration of how differently children like to talk to God and from then on in, I was going to help each child to have the chance to be with and talk to God in their way, by creating space for them to do this, not only through the louder, more messy activities that we had been used to, but also through quiet reflection and stillness.

We don't have a great deal of time at each Sunday School session, but there is time within it to create space for the children to learn about and explore God in their way and to help them to grow closer to Him, whether this is in the banging of the cymbals or in the stillness of quiet.

Through changing my assumptions, I hope that I am helping them, each and every child, to do that.