Everyone has endured the endless traffic light, the queue that goes nowhere, the elevator music piped through the phone line. But what of those periods in your life when everything seems on hold? When you can't do the next thing in your professional or personal life because you can't get to it?

Waiting - be it for health, a life partner, a child, a job - can be an agony, and hope can be exhausting. A firm no in response to the thing you're waiting for might be easier than this constant lack of closure.

But what if waiting means something more? Rather than pure idleness, our prolonged state of need might teach us to look beyond the desired goal to something infinitely better. We find lessons on this throughout the Bible and, if we are paying attention, in our own lives.

Rather than fostering frustration, periods of waiting might have great truths to tell us. It might show us that hope is worthwhile. Waiting might even be a gift in and of itself.