Waiting Is Not Wasting

I was folding the same load of laundry for the third time, not because it needed refolding but because my hands needed something to do while the two pink lines refused to become the two pink lines I wanted them to be, month after month, for going on two years now. My sister-in-law had just announced her second, and I'd smiled and hugged her in the driveway and then gone inside and folded towels that were already folded, because if I sat still I was going to have to feel the whole shape of what waiting had become in my life, which by then felt less like a season and more like a sentence.

I keep coming back to a verse in James, the one about the farmer waiting for the land to yield its precious fruit, patient through the early and the late rains, and for a long time I resented that image, because a farmer at least gets to watch the field, gets some visible sign that the ground is doing something even in the waiting. What I have is a bathroom cabinet full of test sticks and a calendar with dates circled and crossed out. But I've started to notice that James doesn't say the farmer is passive. He says the farmer establishes his heart, which is its own kind of labor, a bracing against despair that has to happen again and again, season after season, whether or not anything visible is growing.

I don't know if I believe yet that this waiting is doing something in me. Some days it just feels like loss with extra steps. But I put the towels away, properly this time, and didn't fold them again.