Waiting...

When you live in the City you wait in line for everything. You wait for food, the bathroom, computers at the library ( which is where I am now ). You wait for red lights to turn to green lights, wait for red hands to turn to white men walking ( or green men walking if you find your self in Europe). And if you live in Houston you definitely wait on the METRO.
One aspect of this year is our constant dependency on the public transit system here in Houston. The METRO, as it is called, is not the best system in the U.S. when it comes to public transit but it is not the worst either. Though there is one aspect that is always infused with the metro and that is waiting...
When my teammates and I get off of one bus to transfer to another the question isn't where do we go it is how long do we wait. In most aspects it is more beneficial for you to walk the direction you are heading and hope that when the bus comes by you are near enough to a stop that you can flag it down.
I will say one thing though, I have grown to love waiting for the bus, or at least I try, I realized this week while waiting for the bus that I always take to Yellowstone Academy, is that I am not waiting on the Bus the bus is Waiting on me! The METRO wasn't set up so that I could criticize it and be upset that it is late but rather the METRO was setup to help me reach my destination without having to walk fifteen miles round trip everyday.
I have found many ways to make the time pass quickly while waiting on a bus, however the thing I have found that makes time pass better then reading, talking to the other people waiting, or even complaining( my initial attempt to make time fly by) is trusting that the lord has his time and that the bus is running on that. For some reason the bus is late and I will be late but that is exactly what God wants.
There have been many times where my teammates and I have had to run to catch buses and other times when we miss buses, but almost every time that my team and I or even just myself have missed a bus and had to wait on the next we have met new friends or seen old ones. Those social collisions would not have happened if we had driven, or caught the earlier bus, or taken our friend up on the ride home. In "New Neighbor" by Leroy Barber the president of Mission Year there is a section that asks a simple question "would Jesus drive?" In this little section of the book the writer talks about an instance on the bus where the bus was late and was taking its time on its route but then it had to stop for about five minutes to allow a woman in a wheel chair to get on. People had to get out of their seats on an already crowded bus, but no one griped or grumbled. Why? because they all knew the woman and in fact instead of complaining they were all talking to her and being congenial. For a moment people stopped worrying about being on time and stopped worrying about having to wait and instead enjoyed the simple interactions of human connection.
This is not meant to be an attack on those who use and own cars, because most of our country is built on an automobile centered society and blah blah blah. However if you live in a city with public transit try it out see what people use all the time and put your self in their shoes. You never know you may be sitting on the bus and next thing you know Jesus is sitting next to you.


I know this is a loaded topic and it doesn't make much sense but I only have so much time on the computer in the library...I will talk about this more however.


I love you all
Ike