Thanks Webtricks and yes you are correct--this was my first transaction. I have been cramming to understand the technology and I do have a fundamental understanding of what is going on. I can easily envision that the community block data is getting larger by the second and given it is encrypted using the SHA-256 encryption algorithm that the decryption process can take time. However, I have also read that the miners will give precedence to larger transactions over the smaller ones. For my first transaction I only sent $200 US dollars to my wallet.