Waiting is fine if you can forget about what you’re waiting for. It’s why we do our best to occupy ourselves during the wait. It alleviates the suffering.

A lobby is a holding cell for those in wait. There’s anticipation about, often for something we’d rather ignore. We must fasten ourselves to that place and gut it out. We’re forced to be still—uncomfortable for many and downright painful for the go-getters, the busy, and the frenetic.

So yesterday I waited by myself in a lobby with the TV playing something I didn’t want to watch. For the next 15 minutes, my car would be getting an oil change. But when you give professionals the opportunity to scour your car, it’s never just an oil change.

I’d been here before. Staring through the big glass windows. Watching the fellas open the hood, tinker, inspect, print the sheet, attach it to the clipboard, and make their way to the lobby door. Oh I was ready for the spiel. Not only would I get the oil change, but they could also quickly and easily replace the brake fluid, flush the radiator, rotate the tires, change the air filter, lubricate the chassis, recalibrate the ocular mount, gentificate the burkface motor, and a la George Costanza, tell me I need a new Johnson rod.

If I said “yes,” my $30 oil change would become a $1,700 nightmare. There was no way in Jacob Marley’s hell I was going to drop that kind of cheddar on my car at Christmas. So why bother listening to the spiel? Why allow this dude to go through the rigmarole just for me to say “no thank you”? I would stop him and say “not interested in anything else, just the oil change.”

So he came through the door and sat down with the clipboard. I didn’t care to be coached on my car. I didn’t need or want to fork out thousands on this visit. I didn’t even want to be in this lobby. There were a thousand other things to do and places to be. And as he started to talk, and I started to say “not interested,” I shut my mouth.

He talked for maybe 45 seconds. I nodded pleasantly, as if maybe everything he was recommending sounded just awesome to me, that perhaps I’d walk out of Fast Lube with essentially a brand new car. He finished by asking if I wanted to do any of those car things today that I didn’t understand. I told him, “no thank you, just the oil change today.” And then the revelation.

He thanked me for letting him tell me all the stuff. He said most people interrupt him and say “not interested, just an oil change.” He said it’s part of his job to tell people what’s going on with their car. Part of his job. For this guy to have success today, for this guy to get a back pat from his employer, for this guy to feel like whatever he has to say people may actually give a damn about, that it may actually help them, he has to give the spiel. It had no meaning to me, and in that moment meant everything to him.

I had a right to interrupt. I was getting a sales pitch. I knew what he was serving I wasn’t going to be eating. But I shut my mouth, sat in that dreary lobby for 45 additional seconds (I’ll never have those back), and didn’t try to make it my moment. And another person felt valued.

This is no back pat for me. I have much to learn in the realm of patience, much to overcome in regards to my own selfishness. In this quick trip to get an oil change, I learned something that I already knew.

My life is a flurry of activity and a quest to gain things. This only multiplies in December amidst shopping and partying and preparing. There is no time to be still.

Yet to be still, to not be after mine for even 45 seconds, can ever-so-slightly but importantly alter my life or someone else’s.

What if we multiplied stillness instead of busyness in our lives? What if this Christmas we sat still in a chair for 30 minutes, reflecting on how wonderful we have it, how beautiful our lives are even in the midst of hard things?

If we multiplied stillness instead of busyness, I doubt we’d get as much done. But I’d bet what we got done would have exponentially more meaning.

Luke 2:19 – But Mary treasured all of these things, pondering them in her heart.