What I Am Waiting For

The school year is proceeding with all its surprises and turns as well as the expected daily events. Two days a week, I have to be present in the cafeteria for breakfast duty. I am not complaining. It's just a fact for me that twice a week, I and another teacher work the cafeteria, keeping order, making sure the kids get their breakfast, eat, and get to class by 8:05 and no later. This year the breakfast time seems more pleasant because the kids are following, for the most part, the posted cafeteria rules, which include no talking in line.

It is also a time for seeing the cutest little faces, helping them open their cartons of juice or milk, consoling them when they are having a bad start for the day, hearing some funny or cute thing they might say when we ask them how they are doing.

One little girl stood in the line the other day, waiting quietly, as if someone had agreed to go into the kitchen to get her something. Recognizing her as a kinder, I asked her what she was waiting for. She said "French toast." I looked at the food items in the serving area, and saw only muffins and cereal and juice and milk. No french toast. "There's no french toast today, honey," I explained. "Uh-huh," she said nodding her pony-tailed head. "My mommy said today was french toast. I'm waiting for them to bring it out." The other kids continued to file past us, looking curiously at us as they walked by with their trays of muffins and cereal and juice and milk. "Did someone say they were getting you some french toast?" I asked her. She looked at me for a moment, then shook her head in resignation. "See," I pointed to the available choices in the serving trays. "You can have cereal or muffins, with juice and milk. That's all. We'll have french toast another day, okay?" She said okay, and decided she didn't want to eat after all, returning to her classroom looking disappointed. That day was her second day of school. Heck of a way to start the school year in kindergarten. No french toast for breakfast.

But I understood completely the desire for something that you are pretty sure is going to be available, and you wait for it with all the sincerity and surety that it will happen. Yet, as the moments pass by, you realize that maybe you misunderstood the signals, or someone told you wrong, or maybe, just maybe, you haven't waited long enough, that you have to wait a little longer. Or even a lot longer.

So I ask myself, not meaning to have it answered here, but just sending it out into the cosmos of life, what am I waiting for? What is it that I am wanting so much that I find myself searching for it every day? What is this expectation in my heart that pushes me forward day after day, hoping I will find it?

I am waiting for something. Sometimes I think I know what it is, and other times, I'm not quite as sure. Sometimes the restlessness is so intense that I can't stand it, and I know that I'm close to finding it, and other times, I am more patient and content just to recognize that I am in the "Waiting" zone.

It is too late to continue where this is going. I may have to consider this question at another time.