Review | The Waiting Place | Eileen Button

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At times beautifully written and at times full of cliché, The Waiting Place: Learning to Appreciate Life’s Little Delays by Eileen Button is a worthwhile read if only for its powerful honesty.

Button – an adjunct professor, newspaper columnist, and pastor’s wife – is a competent writer, but she relies a little too much on trite sayings like “too much month left at the end of the money” (pg. 65) that she seems to think are clever.

She also leans too much sometimes toward corny sentimentality – “When we listen closely enough, we think we hear the angels cry.” (pg.121) Button is at her best when she simply tells the stories. These are stories that don’t need sentimental embellishment to bolster their power (good stories rarely do!), and the book falters when she tries to do so.

There’s little that stands out in her writing style, but I found her honesty so courageous that the book’s flaws were forgivable. Indeed, the beauty of The Waiting Place is found in her honesty. Most of us know that church people often expect complete perfection from pastors and their wives, but Button is brave enough to talk about the struggles of a white, formerly middle-class woman who finds herself applying for WIC, a mother suffering through her child’s horrific birth defect, and a pastor’s wife on the receiving end of both the grace and the venom of the church. Some of these struggles are born out of her self-centeredness, and that is what’s so refreshing about The Waiting Place. She is honest about the struggles and about where they come from.

One of my favorite passages is found in chapter 13. Her description of the church is powerful: “She is loving and life changing; she is malicious and overbearing. She is beautiful; she is ugly. She is as light as day, capable of astonishing kindness and generosity; she is as dark as night, capable of unspeakable evil.”

There is not a great deal of theological depth here, all of the stories in The Waiting Place come back to one thing. Eileen Button and her husband had wonderful dreams about where their lives were going and what God would do with them, but it’s never quite looked the way they’d hoped. That is the waiting place – the place where you wait to become. The problem is – as Button discovered and shares with us – that we spend most of our lives in that place. Button tells us that the trick is to find the beauty – the workings of God – in the waiting.



Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze®.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”