SOME WAITING TIMES

(In My Personal Life)

My elders always admonished me that the experience of patient waiting promoted character-building. I was never “big” on patience and waiting for buses, trains, planes, people who didn’t keep appointments tested my patience. My preacher dad (who had the patience of Job) encouraged me to develop patience in waiting for even little goals—a second piece of chocolate, for example. That virtue of patient waiting is still in the making. 

For all of my first seven years at Christmastime, I had been waiting for a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby doll to be under our parsonage small Yule tree. It hadn’t happened. Money, I knew, was scarce, but then Santa, I heard, was generous! Little did

I realize that now, when I was in school, my dear mother had been making a doll out of old parsonage curtains, sewing and stuffing and seaming the body, creating a large baby doll—and buying through a mail order catalog a blonde, blue-eyed beautiful head.   

Working also at night, late and weary under a dim lamp light, her fingers became pricked and sometimes bled.

But, oh, on my seventh Christmas Eve, the long looked-forward-to baby doll was completed, dressed in my old best baby clothes, carefully saved through the years, and mother laid her in my arms. The waiting was over! As I sat in my little rocking chair, my preacher dad, a musician too, said “A final practice now of your song for the program in the church…and remember, dear, you’re singing with praise and love to the Lord.”

So that evening at the church, beside a twelve-foot-high fir tree, holding lighted candles precariously fastened, I sat facing an overflow congregation, looking at my new Dolly May. Then out at a sea of faces in the candlelit church, I took courage, sat up straight in my little rocking chair and, holding tight my love gift, sang loud and clear, “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down His sweet head.”

 Through the years, I cannot let it be forgotten that once there was that magic moment, that sweet spot for one brief glorious moment so much sought that will always be sheer wonder and my lot—my first long waiting period brought, I knew, with sacrifice and love.

Note:  Dolly May was treasured for forty years; the little rocking chair is still used in my home.

                                                                              --Virginia Williams