Waiting is no easy thing. Krystal Ribble unpacks how she has learned to rest in seasons of waiting, when answers from God seem to be a long time coming.
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Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr: I’m Julie Lyles Carr you’re listening to the allmomdoes podcast. Part of the Christian parenting podcast network. Today on the allmomdoes podcast. I’m your host, Julie Lyles Carr and I have Krystal Ribble with me today. Hey Krystal. I’m so glad you’re here. Let me know where you’re from and all the things, kids, dogs, cats, everything.
Krystal Ribble: Well, thank you so much for having me, Julie. I am from Nashville, Tennessee. That’s where I live with my husband and our three boys soon to be four boys as I’m having another one in the fall. So, um, our oldest is 10 and we have a four year old one and a half, and then the baby coming in the fall. Oh, that’s so exciting.
Julie Lyles Carr: You are in the thick of it. My friend. What has been one of the things that has been most interesting to you as a mom, when you started going into that part of your career of motherhood? What was something that was kind of interesting to you that you discovered?
Krystal Ribble: For me, it was all about capacity. Not realizing I had the capacity that I do.
I was not a girl that dreamed of being a mom, but kind of a mom at all. But I definitely didn’t think that I’d have biological kids and our oldest son is adopted. And then after that, the next three are biological. And so it’s just been interesting to me as we’ve brought like each child, each new child into our home,
how my heart just has more space and I have more room and I have more bandwidth than I thought I did. Right, right. So it’s been surprising to me.
Julie Lyles Carr: I love that answer because that is something that I would agree with very much in my journey is I didn’t know that I could stay up that many hours. I didn’t know that I could feel that deeply love that hard, worry that much, all the things I didn’t know, Krystal, that I would actually stay up until three in the morning, putting little, teeny, tiny stars of icing on a Barbie cake for a birthday dinner.
Like, I didn’t know I had the capacity to do those things.
Krystal Ribble: Now it’s so many things that you juggle and so many hours of sleep that you lose, you’re right. You just don’t realize that you can do it right, but you do.
Julie Lyles Carr: You do it shows up and you do it. You know, another facet of momming that I find really interesting is how much time we spend waiting as moms.
And by that, I mean, everything from the reality of the length of how long a pregnancy takes or an adoption process, which can be doubled and triple that kind of time to sitting in the parking lot, waiting for the soccer practice to end for five-year-olds. With you thinking they’re really not going to go pro do we really need to run one more drill? To waiting in the OBS office for all of those visits that you have leading up to the birth of that baby. Waiting is one of those things that as moms, we tend to do a lot of I’ve laughed and said that I
spent my youth in waiting rooms, you know, for kids who were in parking lots, waiting for kids. So, and in this culture today, what is interesting is we’re not used to waiting for anything. And I only see this accelerating. You know, we used to think that once we had the interwebs, that was something that really heralded in a sense of being able to access information very quickly and all of that.
But now, I mean, the fact that Amazon’s to the place that basically you can think it, and it shows up is pretty interesting. I feel like our bandwidth for knowing how to wait and our patience with it has really begun to wane. We just don’t have that muscle much anymore. And in your new book Love Me In The Waiting you explore this.
What have you seen that made you think? Huh? You know, there is a lot of waiting that goes on and we really need to make sure that we understand that that’s okay. That there’s a normality to some of the weighting that we need to do.
Krystal Ribble: Sure. I mean what you said and how we just don’t really, we don’t have the muscle.
We don’t have the practice of waiting anymore. We don’t have to, we have microwaves. And like you said, we have Amazon and things can show up in a couple hours if even that, you know, and, um, it’s just a different world. We don’t have to practice the type of waiting that we often hear about, um, in our everyday lives yet we all have long waiting seasons and sometimes short.
But, um, so I, you know, I had a couple instances in my life where I felt like my waiting seasons were really lonely for me and where people couldn’t really understand what I was going through. And so I just started wanting to explore, what does it say in the Bible about this? There are so many different stories about waiting in the Bible and how did they do it and how did they do it
well? You know, what was the Lord trying to show us about himself there? How did he show up in the waiting? And so that’s kind of where the book came from, just for me wanting to explore those. Those ideas.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. And there is a lot that we see in the faith lives of those who’ve gone on before us, in which they were called to wait.
And I think one of the fascinating things, as I look at the idea of waiting, I think about that verse in Hebrews that talks about they didn’t really, they didn’t get to see the promise in their lifetime. They had to see it from afar. You know, one of the mythologies in a sense that I think sometimes surrounds this notion of waiting in our faith walks is that the outcome will be exactly what we’re wanting as long as we’re willing to wait long enough for it.
And yet that’s not always the case either. Even in some of those heroes of the faith. How did you process that as you were taking this deep dive, into looking at waiting? How did you process the fact that sometimes you can spend a long time in that waiting room and the outcome is not what you thought you were waiting for?
Krystal Ribble: It’s definitely not an easy thing to process. I don’t think that you do process it and come out on the other side of it. Cause like, you know, the story you were mentioning with Moses and the people of Israel, that particular story, it’s interesting that you brought it up because I say often that a season that we are in as a family right now, it really resonates with me,
how Moses was. He was so determined and I say that he had this deep faith pointed in one direction. And the Lord had asked him to do something and he was very specifically, I’m going to do this. And it even says at the end, when the Lord says to him, you’re not going to make it to the promised land. Like this is not in the cards for you.
I’m going to show it to you. You’ve spent all these years faithfully leading my people there, but you’re not going to make it there yourself. And the scripture says that his eyes were undimmed and he was unabated. And so he, his intensity, his faith and his intensity, and what the Lord had said to him was the same, the day he died, as it was the day the Lord gave him this to do.
And that has been very encouraging to me to read a story of someone that believed the Lord for something and believed him so deeply, that he sat his whole life in that trajectory. So again, it’s a hard thing to wrap your mind around. It’s so difficult because we can read these Bible stories and we get to read the beginning of the end pretty quickly.
Like this one, what happened at the beginning of move forward real fast? Yeah. We get through it pretty quickly, but our life is not that way. And so it has been interesting for me to study these stories and to see the whole picture, to see the entire arc, but also be able to place myself within the arc.
And it’s kind of like, okay, this is sort of where I am right now. And I see what the Lord does on each side of this. And so I’m just going to have faith for that. I’m going to believe in that I’m going to hope that he will show up for me in this way, or at least I know that he’ll show up, but I just need to look for it.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. Right. Find those moments and really be paying attention to where it does show up. You know, I love in the title that it’s referring to us, loving God. Love me. God saying, love me in the waiting. But I also think that it can be God’s message to us that he loves us in the waiting as well. And it doesn’t always feel like that when God’s making us wait.
It doesn’t always feel like we have his love. How are some ways that we can look for his love, where he shows up, even though we’re not at the end of the story or at the conclusion of what we think we’re waiting for? How do we stay in that posture where we’re both loving him well, but we are understanding he loves us as well, even though we’re having to wait.
Krystal Ribble: Sure. Well, one of the, I talk about several different concepts that have to do with this in the book and the main one is I’m talking about, how do we expect God in the waiting instead of expecting an end. Because oftentimes we start some particular journey and we just want to see where’s the light at the end of the tunnel,
and as long as I can see it, then I’m okay. We’ll get there. But you miss so much. In the middle, you miss what the Lord might be doing during this time and why he might have put you into this time. And so within that, I talk about a couple of different concepts, depending on the story that I’m exploring.
But for instance, like Noah, when the Lord kind of suspended him in time and put him inside of this ark, one of the things that I noticed in that story is that the Lord was preserving him. And I don’t think we often look at our waiting seasons as a preservation, you know? Cause you kind of think I’ve just got a weather
this I got to get through it. I don’t know what kind of shrapnel will be on me when I get out of it. But if we look at it as no, the Lord might be protecting you from something. And that’s why he’s put you in this time. There’s also, he’s trying to teach you different things. He’s also trying to show you, I think about the story of Daniel and the lion’s den in his waiting was shorter.
His deliverance was quick, but in my opinion, so much about that waiting period was just to show the majesty of who he was. It’s kind of looking at your circumstance and asking the Lord like, Lord, can you show me what it is that you’re doing in this time? And maybe so much of what I’m going through is for other people so that they can see who you are.
They can see how powerful you are and how good you are.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. And we forget about that outward bound message that comes from people who are walking alongside us, watching us have to wait on certain things and, and the way that we walk it and the things that they’re going to experience from our lives in their observations.
I think it’s fascinating that one of your degrees is in gerontology. And in that space, what did you learn watching older generations, who perhaps in their childhoods and young adulthoods, didn’t have immediate access to a lot of stuff and all of that, but at the same time had been walking lives out that whether they had had a childhood that prepared them for waiting seasons or not, they were going to encounter them? What did you learn in observing that population?
Krystal Ribble: Wow. It’s such an interesting question and no one has asked me that in so long. I love exploring that though. Um, you know, obviously spending time with those generations, um, their wisdom is just so beyond anything that we can imagine, you know, and the things that they’ve been able to see over a lifetime, just all these nuggets that
you know, I studied that in my undergrad degree. And so early twenties, I am hearing from these people and they’re giving me these nuggets of things that I couldn’t even fathom. I wasn’t a mom yet. I wasn’t a wife yet. It was really hard for me to understand those life circumstances. But one of the things that I noticed, especially with people that were believers, was just like the peace and trust that they had in the Lord and just how certain they were of him.
I’ve experienced the same thing in my parents who are, who are not very old, but the same kind of steadiness, you know? And it’s just something that was really fascinating to me that like drew me to them. So I noticed that in particular, in older generations, just once you’ve lived so much life, you’ve been able to see where the Lord has shown up.
Right in certain areas and you can be more certain about something that, something that would make me panic, you know, right now be more certain about it because you’ve kind of gone through that journey.
Julie Lyles Carr: Yeah. You’ve seen things in their way and in their time work out, even if it works out in a way that’s unexpected still, right.
That it works out. It’s interesting. The way that. We tend to treat the older generation. I know we have talked, you know, many times about, oh, we don’t respect the older generation in the same way and we do this and we do that. But I find now it’s interesting. I see, you know, many members of my own generation or younger who are more willing to embrace the older generation in a certain way, but almost as characatures, instead of understanding that.
You can still have a wildly vibrant young spirit regardless of the age of your body and the benefit is in that vibrant young spirit, you can have all of this wisdom that you’ve acquired to carry with you. How do you think we need to be re-imagining if you will, the place of those who are older, the place of those who’ve been in the waiting room
far longer in life than some of the rest of us? How do we move from that place? I mean, sure. If you have a grandma who’s hilarious and says amazing things and all that, enjoy that, but also to be willing to not just take her humor or, you know, her wild character, but be really inculcating and applying the wisdom,
instead of continuing to mark this line in the sand and saying this generation, this older generation can’t understand all of that kind of stuff. How do we really put our arms around the whole person who may be in an older generation?
Krystal Ribble: Gosh, Julie, that is a difficult answer to give. I feel like that comes with time, you know, I mean the older you get I’m in my mid thirties, my husband would say, I’m on the downhill slope of that now.
And as I have reached this period of time, then we’ll 45 and 50 are not that far away, and they don’t seem as old as they once did. And so then I feel like I can understand someone in their fifties a little differently than I did when I was like 19 or 20, it was like light years away. And so I feel like with each year in your life, that changes a little bit as you get closer to something and you realize, I still feel like I’m 23, but I’m forties or something.
And you start to realize it’s not that disconnected. Right. So I think that comes with time, first of all. And so some people that are older than me are going to do it way better than I do. But like you said, like thinking of them as characatures, I think that we do the same thing with how we read the Bible,
cause these are real people that we’re reading about. And I often think about like, these are real people that when I get to heaven, I’ll actually meet them and they weren’t just a story. They weren’t just this idea, you know? And so if you can look at the people that are physically in front of you in your life, in that way, right,
these are real people with real situations. And at some point they were my age living and feeling the things that I felt, how would I Krystal, feel when I’m 70. I’m probably still gonna feel like I’m going to still feel like Krystal. Yeah. Yeah. I’m still gonna feel like me. And so like, if you can try to, uh, you know, attribute that to how they probably feel, because at some point
they were your age.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right? As one of the things that fascinates me about when we get to the other side of this life, that we will be then contemporaries with all the people who’ve gone on before. And there’s a filter that people are playing with online right now, which takes old photos and animates them a little bit.
We’ve also seen film redos that have been coming out of documentary type film archives in which these films are colorized. So world war one, world war II, colorize, and all the sudden when you see it in that way, and you see these young soldiers and they look like the kid down the street because there’s something about that colorization and movement that brings it just screaming across the decades to us in that same way.
When I. Again, when I just, like you said, when I think about Bible characters and we think of them as characters and yet they were real people. To really put flesh and life and color behind them in a way that is new, helps us understand just how applicable and amazing this weaving of stories is. Now part of the way that you got introduced to this idea and having to really do a deep dive into thinking through the waiting periods of life, whether that is just
waiting through a long life and all the times that those kinds of things come up, that you just have seasons that, you know, you’re just going to be parked for a while, to mom life to all the rest is because of a situation that you’ve been walking through with your son. What is that situation and how did that spark this interest in the weighting seasons of life?
Krystal Ribble: Yeah. So our oldest son, he’s 10 and just about a year and a half ago, we discovered that he had a brain tumor and it’s been really interesting journey because, um, he has a neurological disease that he’s been really unaffected by. So it’s been weird. It’s like, you’re told that he has this thing, but he’s completely normal.
And we don’t see any signs of it. And so he has, he had to be monitored pretty closely just because they had found this particular disease. And through that monitoring is how we found that a brain tumor had started to form. And again, he has shown no neurological symptoms from it, but we’re at the hospital all the time
and they’re telling me what the scans say. And they’re telling me all these different things. Um, and our situation it started out with, oh, here’s this brain tumor and this is the type of chemo treatment that we do. Great. How long did we do that? A little over a year. Great. But then in the midst of that, it changed and the tumor did something unexpected.
We had to have a pretty major brain surgery. He recovered from that, um, a hundred percent in a way that they didn’t expect really. And then we’ve switched, we’ve altered courses and we’re doing a different type of chemo regimen now, which again will be another year, but um, there’s still some unknown things that are happening with him.
Some things that are not really explainable, even by his doctors. It’s kind of a new phenomenon of things that they’re happening in him. And so, um, you know, I started writing this book not long after we had found out that I had dreamed of this book for years, but I started writing it around the time that we had found out that he had, uh, his brain tumor.
And so exploring how long someone would wait for something. And like I was saying, the things I wanted to find out from the Lord, it’s like, how do you show up during this time? And where are you? Because I’ve had several moments of that. Like, Lord, I really need to feel you. I need to feel your presence. I don’t know where you are.
And very similar to Daniel in the lion’s den, I have felt like we’ve been in the dark with these lines that really could devour us and you have no control over this. But I always say that I would rather be where the Lord is. And if the Lord is in this journey and I believe that he is. Then I’d rather be here.
It may not feel the safest to me cause I don’t understand it, but I know that he’s here and I know that he’s with my son and I know he’s with our family. So it’s an interesting thing to navigate and especially studying, waiting. Cause I don’t know when the end of this is, I don’t know if there is an end.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. It’s interesting because I think sometimes in faith communities, We can see extended periods of waiting. We can see the prayer for healing that’s gone out and we’re not seeing it fulfilled, or the resolution to a situation and it’s not coming. And sometimes we can put pressure on members of our faith community.
I’ve had it come at me. I have two children who have, who are differently abled. And when I have spoken on that, From a stage before I’ve gotten emails from people saying you’re just not believing big enough or hard enough. Why aren’t you leaning into their situation rather than continuing to fight for your child?
Sometimes I think that we perceive waiting as some kind of lack on the part of the person who’s walking through it. If they would just pray big enough, dig in hard enough. How do we need to adjust our thinking on that? Because those places, I think we can do a lot of harm rather than good. Now, should we encourage each other to grow your faith?
Of course, the word of God tells us to do that, but there’s this very interesting line that begins to happen when we take a look at something we’re walking through or someone else’s walking through and we decide to qualify it as a result of not having enough faith. How do we, how do we evaluate that?
Krystal Ribble: Gosh.
Well, first I think you have to put it in perspective from maybe who you’re getting that information from.
Julie Lyles Carr: Well, yes. Always consider the audience. Yes.
Krystal Ribble: Consider it. And, um, and what they’ve walked through. Right. You know, it’s so easy. I say that faith comes easy to me because of how I was raised. My parents are both individuals that are full of faith.
My, my dad’s a minister and as a child, any time that they would have worried about something that they were scared about something, or they really protected us from that. And they showed us that the Lord will show up and he will take care of our needs and he will take care of our needs when we need them.
So for me, Until I reached hard times in life, you know? And that for us, I mean, I guess any number of things you could name, but, um, the hardest thing in the beginning for my husband and I was, um, we lost several adoptions before we brought our son home. So it was like once I reached some of the hard times, then my perspective shifted.
So prior to that, I don’t know that I would have said that to someone like, oh, I don’t think you’re praying hard enough cause it probably wasn’t my personality to say. However, I think it would have been easier for me to think it.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right, right.
Krystal Ribble: Because that’s what I had always done and life seemed okay.
But I can tell you that no amount or lack of prayer has caused my son to be in the position that he’s in. And no amount of prayer or lack thereof on my part is causing where we are right now. And so I think that’s the circumstance with everyone. Everyone is trusting the Lord in the best way that they know how.
And I don’t think there’s any laziness coming. You know, when you come to the foot of the cross, when you come to the foot of the throne and you’re asking the Lord for something, sometimes your weariness can be perceived as laziness, maybe by other people, but the journeys are hard. And they are wrong and they beat you down.
But what I have found about my relationship with the Lord is even if I can’t physically speak, he understands everything that’s in my heart. And so sometimes it’s just the silence, the silence of sitting there and the uttering of just my insides that makes it to him, you know, Even if I don’t seem like I’m actively saying something, right.
Julie Lyles Carr: I think part of what is just implicit and being in a season of waiting is the understanding that you don’t truly have control and again, we want to walk in great faith and we want to walk and strong belief. And we see many examples in scripture where that’s a really important component of walking out a journey.
And in that I think sometimes we can veer into places where we watch someone circumstance. It scares us. It feels very out of control. We would not want to have to be in the waiting room that long. And so in an attempt to feel like we have some level of control, we equate it to their practices, their rituals, their faith walk,
and that’s how we’re going to protect ourselves from ever being in the same circumstance. I do that. It seems to me that waiting there’s a waiting room personality, right? Like I’ve known people. It’s so interesting. Krystal who have been in seasons of waiting, but they’re really good at just sort of continuing to go on with things and it’s there.
It is definitely an open tab in their heart and in their awareness, but they just seem to do well at filling their life with other things while they’re in the waiting. And then there are those of us, and I have to include myself in this camp where that becomes this major focus of everything. I mean, it just paints all the walls and is the aroma in the room, no matter how many other tabs are open.
So what role do you think personality plays into this as well in terms of how we wait, and then there are those people that you and I would know who they distract themselves to the point that they’re really in denial about the waiting room and they’re not gleaning the lessons from it. So how do we work with our individual personalities, our individual bents to both embrace and stay in faith and give the appropriate amount of pushback when we need to, while we’re waiting.
Krystal Ribble: Yeah. I mean, it is so individualistic, like you said. Everybody copes with things differently and that’s part of the reason why it might be easy for us to judge a book by its cover. Right. Well, this is how I would do that. You know, I would deal with it this particular way, but that’s not the case for everyone.
So I feel like as individuals, you have to shut off everyone on the outside and just say to the Lord, like, Lord, I need you to give me the tools that I need to navigate this and to navigate this well for me and for my family. Yeah. And not be concerned about what other people are saying. In the book. I do explore job and his wonderful friends that came and gave him so much advice, you know, the good and the bad, the ugly, all, all of those things.
And, but what I find really interesting about his story is that if you look at the entirety of the chapter of Job, most of that book, he’s commiserating and talking to his friends. And then at the very end, we get this little snippet of when he finally turns to the Lord and he does that with the help of a friend, kind of lifting his head up, like, look back to the Lord and talk to him about this.
And how often do we do that? You know, how often do we quickly run to someone else about what we’re going through? So obviously you’re going to get their opinions, unless you’ve said, don’t give me your opinion, just listen to what I’m saying. Right? Right. You know, you’re going to get the opinions of everyone else around you.
And I feel like in the mom’s face in particular, it’s, it’s quite unsolicited sometimes. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. And people will just tell you their experience and how they feel about it and whatever the book of Job and his final friend that he speaks with is a really good reminder of if you’re going to have to have people around you find someone that is going to lift your head up.
And not only encourage you in that way, but also just points you back to the Lord because it really matters the tools that he’s giving you and how he is going to help you navigate this journey.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. And you know, it’s interesting because in my mom life and personal life, those times I’ve been in a waiting room, literally waiting for a kid, waiting for whatever,
there are people who come into the waiting room who are waiting also, and it’s been fascinating to watch some of them. And I’ve encountered some really amazing people in the waiting room for time to time. And two, I want to be an amazing person in a waiting room. You know, I want to be someone who gives hope and someone who is kind and friendly and yes, maybe there for my own issues or some outcome that I’m looking toward, but also has
the willingness and the faith to see that there are others also who are in the waiting who might need that encouragement. So Krystal, where can listeners find out more about you, your journey and about the book? And again, the book is called, Love Me in the Waiting: Trusting God’s Purpose When You’re Longing for What’s Next. Krystal,
So appreciate you. And thank you for helping all of us know that waiting is not necessarily something that means it means something’s wrong. It can be a place where there can be a lot of growth and there’s hope, and there’s joy. Thanks for helping us look up in those seasons of waiting.
Krystal Ribble: You’re welcome.
Thanks for having me.
Julie Lyles Carr: We’ll find more from this episode on the show notes, be sure and check them out at allmomdoes.com. And wanted to ask you a big favor, be sure and go to wherever you are listening to this podcast. And give us a five-star rating and review. It really helps us get the word out about the podcast.
Can’t wait to see you next time on the allmomdoes podcasts.
