Joy in the Waiting ♦ Amy Anguish

Finding Joy in the Waiting

 by author Amy Anguish

My husband and I have had a lot of waiting over the thirteen years of our marriage. When we first married, we had to wait for him to find a good teaching position. That took two years and moved us thirteen hours away from family. When we decided to have children, we ended up having to wait six and a half years before actually getting pregnant. That was a crazy hard journey, but we came out stronger in the end for it. Several other times through all of that, we’ve been through more job changes and moves. The latest move was this last summer, when my husband got a better teaching position again. We uprooted our little family and headed east from east Texas, where we had lived for six years, and stopped in middle Tennessee. The last six months have been a bit insane, to say the least. We’ve been renting, half our things in a storage unit, as we searched for a house to buy. We took a while to find a new church family, make some new friends, and haven’t found a house quite as quickly as we meant to when we first came. But we’re starting to settle in and will move into our new home over New Years’ weekend, God-willing.

Through all the upheaval, missing some of my things stuck in another location, dealing with cramped spaces and high rent, it’s easy to focus only on the things that have gone wrong, the negative points, the things that didn’t happen as planned. Especially when a certain three-year-old girl colors on the wall only weeks before we’re supposed to move out. Thank goodness for Magic Erasers! Hopefully, it saved our deposit. I discovered I needed to really stop and force myself to remember all the good things. My husband has a job that he loves for the first time in years, which improves so much about our home life. Our kids are both healthy and growing like they should. Even though we don’t get to date as much as we would like, our marriage is strong. We have found new friends and a warm, welcoming church family. And God has worked everything out beautifully for this house we’re buying. While we’ve lived in this townhouse, we’ve had easy access to a playground, my little girl has discovered the joy of sending drawings and notes to friends far away, and we’ve had everything we needed, plus some. So many blessings that would be so easy to miss if we focused only on how long it took for things to happen or how frustrating it was that my Halloween decorations were in storage instead of adorning my home this year.

In my book, An Unexpected Legacy, my character Aunt Ruth had to do some waiting in her past. Her waiting didn’t end as well as mine has so far, but she also didn’t look for the joy in it. Because she couldn’t find the joy in the waiting, it was even harder for her to find joy in anything that happened afterward, either, and it causes trouble for everyone around her. I won’t give away more right now, but I’d love to hear if you enjoy should you choose to pick up a copy and see for yourself. If you’re going through a period of waiting, I hope you choose to focus more on the joy than the negatives. God is with you even when it doesn’t feel like it. And remember: He had to go through some times of waiting, too, when He came to earth as Jesus.

“Even the youths shall faint and be weary, And the young men shall utterly fall, But those who wait on the Lord Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.” Isaiah 40:30-31 [NKJV]

When Chad Manning introduces himself to Jessica Garcia at her favorite smoothie shop, it's like he stepped out of one of her romance novels. But as she tentatively walks into a relationship with this man of her dreams, secrets from their past threaten to shatter their already fragile bond.  Chad and Jessica must struggle to figure out if their relationship has a chance or if there is nothing between them but a love of smoothies.

Amy Anguish grew up a preacher's kid, and in spite of having lived in seven different states that are all south of the Mason Dixon line, she is not a football fan. Currently, she resides in Tennessee with her husband, daughter, and son, and usually a cat or two. Amy graduated with a degree in English from Freed-Hardeman University and hopes in all her creative endeavors to glorify God, but especially in her writing. She wants her stories to show that while Christians face real struggles, it can still work out for good.