The Waiting Place - Book Review

Everyday I am waiting for something.  Sometimes waiting is annoying or irritating, like waiting in traffic to get home.  Other times it produces anxiety or excitement, like watching for the plus sign on a home-pregnancy test.  Waiting in line, waiting for biopsy results, waiting for my kids to grow up a little more, waiting for my co-worker to quit clipping his nails and get back to work so I can concentrate…I constantly find myself in some sort of waiting place.  Sometimes waiting is boring, sometimes frustrating, sometimes thrilling, and even sometimes completely mind-bogglingly numbing.

“To live is to wait.  It’s how we wait that makes all the difference,” says Eileen Button in her book The Waiting Place: Learning to Appreciate Life's Little Delays.  This is not explicitly a how-to book on enduring waiting or developing patience.  It’s more about recognizing the challenges and changes that can take place there if you open your eyes.  Eileen demonstrates this through a collection of humorous essays written as poignant stories compiled during her lifetime of finding herself in various waiting places from the light-hearted waiting for fish to bite while at the lake with her dad to the heart-wrenching waiting to find out if her infant son born with numerous medical problems will live – will breathe.

God brought this book into my life at a time when I was waiting and simultaneously preparing for the arrival of life-altering change. Eileen’s light-hearted tales about the waiting places of her life provided a relief to my own exhaustion from preparation, causing me to laugh out loud as well as ponder my own waiting places that I had visited in my life and what God was doing in them.  She reminded me that “much of life is lived not in the spectacular but in the ordinary, day-in, day-out spaces.” The delightful way she invited me to peek into her life through this book left me feeling like she is a dear friend who shared a great appreciation for life’s little delays. 

BookSneeze® provided me a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.