Beyond Waiting

I was sitting in his living room, my heart divided between what it wanted in that moment and what it wanted for all of time. Looking back now, it seems the choice should have been easy, but sometimes the moment seems to carry more weight than it actually does in truth.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

“Why?”

I’ve always hated that question. Hated how it forces me to sort through my motivation when always the answer is just there at the ready.

I shook my head. “I don’t have a logical answer. I’m sorry, I know that’s what you want.”

But how does one even begin to tell a man that he is too safe, too comfortable, too secure? Isn’t that what any girl should want?

 

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Several people have asked me if I would ever write a follow-up book to Beyond Waiting. I guess that once people hear the details of one’s singleness journey, they want to hear the happy ending. Personally, I think an eventual follow-up containing my love story kind of defeats the purpose (i.e. goes entirely against what I was trying to say in the original book).

If I were going to write a second book, I think I would call it Beyond Reason, and it would be all about living a life that is not safe, comfortable, or, well, reasonable. Because being fully abandoned to the call of God on your life is anything but the aforementioned things.

Oh, we pretend that isn’t true. We go on shaping our comfortable, familiar lives while saying, “God wants me to be happy. God wants me to be safe.”

And while both those things are certainly true, God never intended for us to go about the world’s way of achieving them.

The more I’ve contemplated life, the more I’ve realized that it all boils down to this: Either God is real and He designed us for great and glorious purposes, or this life is all there is and we should live it up.

So why are we holding back, clinging to the guise of stability?

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A few months after my illogical breakup, I was sitting in the midst of a gathering at a missions organization, listening to young man describe his recent trip to the Philippines. He paced the floors and bounced on his heels, simply glowing in the light of his latest adventure. Then he began to cry. He paused in his soliloquy just long enough to compose himself as he detailed the devastation he had seen in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.

And as I sat there, blinking back tears of my own, I had two thoughts.

One: “Safe and Comfortable Guy would never…”

Two: “I want that.”

Every fiber in my being wanted to be the person who, like this man, would answer the phone and say, “I’m in my truck right now. Where are we going?”

I wanted to be the person who would drop everything… and go. I wanted to be the person standing in the middle of the devastation with a bullhorn saying, “I’m here because God loves you this much.”

I hope I will always be the person who clings loosely enough to this world that people will take notice. I hope I will never settle for safe and comfortable when there are great adventures to be had the world over. And I hope, when God comes calling, you, too, won’t think to come up with a list of excuses for why you can’t come over that day.

May you live Beyond Waiting, Beyond Reason, and Beyond Anything You Ever Imagined Possible. (Yeah, still working on the third title.)

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Rebekah Snyder is an author, and she’s finally confident enough to say it. She accidentally branded herself the Singleness Guru a few years ago when her tirade about why girls shouldn’t spend their time waiting for Prince Charming turned into a published book. While she prefers to spend her time immersed in top-secret fiction projects, she has been know to surface long enough to leave a few words of wisdom on www.beyondwaiting.com... Occasionally.









 

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, The She is Set Apart Team wanted to say thank you to all the women who have supported She is Set Apart for the past 6 months.  To show our gratitude we thought it would be fun to do a giveaway of Rebekah's book (the real one—not the one she just made up for the sake of this post, although that would be pretty cool), so if you’ve read this far, you might find yourself the owner of an autographed copy of Beyond Waiting.


Beyond Waiting by Rebekah Snyder Book Giveaway