The Waiting Room

I work for our family business as a duper.  I love it, and not just because it’s a fun job title to have.  Being a duper means I take blank USB drives and put our software on them, which is a process called duplicating, or duping.  In order to dupe, I have to find the right master for the drives I’m duping.  For instance, if I’m duping 32gb drives, I put the 32gb master in my little duping machine, then two blank drives, and hit copy.  When I hit the copy button, a message comes across the screen that says, “Waiting Master.”  The machine then reads the master and copies its files onto the blank drives.  I have 30 dupers (machines, not people), so I see this message many times a night.

Last night, I started thinking about that phrase—“Waiting Master.”  And I thought about who my master is.  When I dupe, if I accidentally put in the wrong master, one of two things will happen:  the drives will dupe but have wasted space on them, or the drives will flash a red light, which means they’ve failed to dupe.  For so many years, I chose the wrong masters for myself.  I chose drugs, alcohol, doctors, even Monty.  And that led to a miserable existence—like the drives with the wrong masters, I would either be wasted or I’d fail, again and again.  I felt like I walked around flashing a red light that told the world I was a failure.  In recovery, I learned again what I’d known for years but had never put into practice—only God should be my master.  Trying to fill His role with other things and people not only didn’t work, it left me feeling purposeless, unmoored, and empty.

Second Peter 2:19 says, in part, “People are slaves to whatever has mastered them.”  I tried for most of my life to find something or someone to follow—for something to be my master—and that left me in complete bondage.  I became enslaved to addiction.  Anxiety.   Depression.  These were the very worst, most cruel masters:  they took everything I had and left me with nothing.  When my life was in ruins around me, and I finally surrendered to God and asked Him to take over, my life began to change.  Every day, I remind myself that I’m powerless over those behaviors that led to such darkness and captivity, and I make a choice to make God my master.  Every day.

If I don’t make that choice every day, I know I will slip right back into replacing God as my master—only now, I tend to make myself the master of my own life.  And when I do this, I’m in serious danger of relapsing into old behaviors.  As soon as I start feeling like “I’ve got this,” I have to remind myself that I don’t.  Not even close.  My willpower is useless, as I’ve proven to myself before.  God’s power trumps my willpower a million times over.  My track record proves that I’m a terrible master of myself.  I make bad choices.  I indulge in bad behavior.  So I remind myself that God’s got this, not me.

And that lifts a huge weight off of my shoulders.  It’s so much easier to let God be the master of my life.  God is a loving master who floods my life with grace and hope.   Yes, He requires certain things from me, and He disciplines me when I make mistakes.  But that discipline is always loving, and so I learn from it.  God is also a trustworthy master.  I’ve put every ounce of my trust in Him, and He has never once let me down or disappointed me.  My other masters did, all the time.  They took and took and took from me until I had nothing left to give.  God doesn’t take; He gives.  He fills me up with love and grace.  He gives my life purpose and meaning.

His timing isn’t always mine.  I would like my prayers to be answered immediately.  I would like change to happen overnight.  But I think about that phrase on my dupers, “Waiting Master,” and I remember.  I have to wait on God.  He always, always has perfect timing, though I may not see it or understand it.  And He always answers my prayers—in His way, not mine.  I pray for patience.  And I think of what my sponsor once told me.  He said I needed to learn to be okay with unrest—with unanswered questions, with worry about my future.  I have to bring those issues to God and leave them at His feet while I wait for answers.  As it says in Psalm 27:14, “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”  While I wait, I’ll keep moving forward along the path God is leading me on.

I asked Monty, my husband/software engineer with the technical mind, to sum up exactly what duping is.  He thought for a minute and said, “Basically, it’s making a mirror image of the master.”  What a beautiful thought—and what a beautiful life goal.  I want to be a mirror image of my master.  I want God to write on my heart and make me just like Him.  This is the work of a lifetime—but what gratifying work!  To become more like Him every day—to reflect His image—there is no greater mission.  No greater purpose.  And no greater calling.