Florida Archives - Natalie Merrill

It’s not always easy to be patient and endure every trial that life throws your way.

Especially in times of travel and in issues involving matters of the heart.

I recently went to Florida with my parents and my sister for a fun little end-of-summer vacay. It was a nice getaway filled with “wave diving,” Baywatch running, beach walks, soaking up the sun, dinners at 4 p.m. to beat the crowds, lazy movie nights on the couch, and cannonballs galore. It was exactly what my soul needed—rest and relaxation near the ocean with my people.

The day we left to head home to Texas, we had a 9:44 a.m. flight, and my dad likes to be early everywhere, so we left the place we stayed around 6 a.m. We returned the rental car and got to the airport with plenty of time to spare, so we breezed through security and went to sit at our gate.

Little did we know just how long we would be sitting there.

Mine and my sister’s phones both buzzed at the same time, and we looked down to see notifications that our flight was delayed. It was a minor annoyance, but I’ve flown enough to know that it happens sometimes. Looks like we had an extra hour to kill. But then the delays just kept coming. Before we knew it, our flight was going to take off much later than planned—as in FOUR HOURS later. Yes, I do realize that some people have flights delayed much longer or even canceled, but when you’re sitting at an airport hoping with everything in you to get home as soon as possible because you’re so exhausted and ready to be in the comforts of your own place, four hours seem like an actual eternity.

*My mom helps make bad situations better.*

I felt pretty bad for the airport and airline employees. Disgruntled people tend to take out their frustrations about a situation on those who honestly have no control over that situation—and there were quite a few unhappy individuals who were supposed to be on our flight that day. I think many of them hastily changed flights, because ours ended up being rather empty.

When the plane finally took off a little after 2 p.m., my only option to make it through the flight with complete sanity was to watch a cheesy romcom, so I naturally went with Rebel Wilson’s smash hit Isn’t It Romantic? I’m honestly not sure that I actually liked the movie, but it killed enough time for us to get back to Dallas.

When we all piled into my brother-in-law’s car when he picked us up from the airport, it felt like the moment when you were a little kid and waited all December long for Christmas to roll around, and you struggled to fall asleep on Christmas Eve but then FINALLY woke up to Christmas Day—and the world felt incredibly normal and not as if you’d just waited for what felt like forever to be in that moment.

*Both of these precious young women waited patiently for their lobsters, and we get to celebrate KB’s wedding soon.*

If we’re being completely honest here, no one really loves waiting (at least I haven’t met anyone who does, but if you do, I’d like to chat). Most of us have our own agendas and plans, and we like things to pan out the way we hope that they will. But that’s not reality. We can’t always control the situations around us, and sometimes we simply have to employ what’s known as patient endurance.

When I first heard that term, it didn’t make a ton of sense to me. If I’m having to endure something, I doubt I’m focusing much on being patient. But the more I reflected on what it really means, the more I wanted it to be something I’m able to practice and hone and model well for others.

A few years ago, I fell pretty hard for a guy who ended up leaving me brokenhearted. Throughout that entire time, I wrote down the Bible verse below on a sticky note and read it to myself at least once every day.

Patient endurance is what you need now so that you will continue to do God’s will. Then you will receive all that He has promised.

And I reminded myself to believe every single word of it.

I still have to remind myself of this often. It’s easy to get so caught up in everything around me and in the plans I think are best for myself that I forget that He has a much better plan than I do. After all, I had to learn patient endurance for four years of frustrations and seeking for meaning in a career path that wasn’t truly where I was meant to stay—and it led me back to where my heart has been all along.

And I’m currently still patiently enduring (well, I’m certainly trying to master that “patient” part of it) this whole singleness thing and also sometimes wondering if it’s a perpetual endurance I’ll need. Whether I get my Christmas morning/car ride back from the airport (a.k.a. THIS) or not, the patient endurance is still a necessary part of my story so that I keep trying to pursue the Lord’s will in my life. If living by faith means never having a love like Nathan’s and Haley’s (if you weren’t a One Tree Hill fan, that might mean zilch to you), then that’s OK. He’s still good, and I’m still His.

And that’s worth every single struggle and pain patient endurance has ever brought with it.

I don’t always pay enough attention to the battery life of my phone.

And it turns out that I also don’t always pay enough attention to my own battery life.

I recently ventured out to Atlanta for a work trip and had quite an interesting experience. Living in Dallas and then Orange County and then back in Dallas, I don’t typically use public transportation much—or ever, really. I had to use the bus system once when I was in Portland, and I ended up getting a ride back to my hotel from a stranger because I struggled to get on the right bus in the first place and then missed the stop at which I was supposed to change buses on the way to the convention I was attending, so the ride with the stranger seemed like a better option. I also let another stranger from the convention take me to the airport the next day.

I lived and wasn’t kidnapped, so it’s fine.

*This isn’t from Atlanta, but it’s from the day before, so it’s relevant. Plus, I love these gals with my whole heart.*

If you’re not from Atlanta or haven’t ever been there, you might not have heard of the MARTA, but it’s a train (I think they might have buses, too) that starts at the airport and has a bunch of stops to different places with multiple lines. To someone more familiar with public transportation, I’m sure this sounds like no big deal, but I’ve taken the DART train in Dallas maybe once in my entire life, and the bus I took when I was at Texas A&M went from a stop near my apartment to campus, so it was fairly simple.

I don’t know my way around the Atlanta airport, so it took me a sufficient amount of time and many questions to people I didn’t know to find out where exactly the MARTA stop was. My plan was to take the train all the way to the end of the line and then take an Uber the remaining six miles or whatever it was to my hotel. It seemed like a smart idea at some point in time.

And then real life happened.

When I got off of the plane, my phone was at 44 percent battery. That seemed sufficient enough. I purposely didn’t use my phone much on the 40-minute (or something like that) train ride, but somehow it was at 6 percent when I got to the final station. I immediately opened the Uber app to arrange for my ride, and it said the driver was only a few minutes away. But apparently getting to the pickup location at the station was more complex than the driver expected, and he got lost. He called me to let me know that he was trying to get to me but that it might be better to get a different Uber.

Not an option—I was at 1 percent battery at that point.

*I prefer traveling with my sister. The MARTA adventure would have been more fun with her.*

I knew that I didn’t have time to call for another Uber, so I asked him please not to cancel the trip and still to come pick me up. I left the app open to follow him and make sure that he was still on his way (and also so that I could know when he arrived), but I was pretty nervous that the phone would die at any second.

I felt really helpless. I was in a big city I know nothing about, and I couldn’t even consult the Google for anything because my phone would for sure die if I opened anything else.

In what I still deem as a miracle, my phone survived until the Uber arrived. As soon as I got in the car, though, it died. I threw up all of the praise hands to Jesus to thank Him for me not having to resort to asking a stranger at the station take me to my hotel, because I was pretty sure that there were some people in the area who likely weren’t as trustworthy as I would hope that they would be.

I realized something about myself—I was more concerned about the battery life in my phone than I’ve ever been about the battery life in my own life. When my phone got down to 1 percent, I wanted to give the phone as much rest as possible so that it didn’t expend all of its energy. But when I get down to 1 percent, I don’t always allow myself the rest that I should.

It’s easy to get going so fast and take on so much that we forget to take care of ourselves. It’s common to love others as much as we can but then not love ourselves enough. I know that I’m often guilty of this. But the percentage left in my phone isn’t as important as the percentage left in me.

Thankfully, I did get to take a vacation with my parents and sister and spend some time at the beach in Florida. We used to come here a lot when I was a little kid, and I came again about five years ago. It’s nice to be back. It’s a different beach and lifestyle than I got accustomed to in California, but it’s still peaceful and relaxing.

I’m excited for when I get back home, too. There are so many changes that have been going on in my life in the last couple of years—and especially in the last couple of months—but it will be nice to be back in the classroom and get back to a sense of normalcy.

I love people—and I mean that. I think it’s truly important to be there for people and to make sure that they feel valued and loved. But I’m also learning (yet again) that it’s absolutely essential to make sure that you feel valued and loved by yourself, as well.

I guess all of the reminders about getting enough sleep at night are actually pretty legit. After all, you don’t want to be struggling and feeling like you’re constantly operating at 1 percent.

And you want to make sure that you’re fully charged when you get to where you need to be.

Tag: Florida

Because having patient endurance certainly isn’t always easy

Because your battery life is important, too