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Mar 10, 2024 06:00am

When Is On Time?

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I’m the oldest of three girls, and we’re all alike in some ways and different in others. (Mother always said, “If you had ten kids, they’d all be different!”) One of the ways we’re different is when we get to a family event. My middle sister will always be very early, and the youngest one will invariably always be late.

We were all raised by the same parents, but my “always late” sister has been married, for many years, to a very “laid back, whatever will be, will be” kind of guy. So, they get to an event eventually, but the rest of us usually grow impatient waiting on them.

The other is married to a former command sergeant major in the Army Reserves who is also the former chief of the fire department in a large city, and, to top it all off, he’s a deacon in a Baptist church! He is a “type A” personality personified. Joe is famous for saying, “Early is on time, on time is late, and late is inexcusable!” Hence, he and my sister are always early. So, if they’re coming to my house, I know to plan accordingly, and we visit for a while until our youngest sister and her family get there.

Me? I’m usually about 15 minutes early, but that wasn’t always the case. I remember one Sunday morning when I was about 13 — I was running late for Sunday School and ran “smack dab” into the preacher. He grabbed me by my shoulders to keep us both from falling and as I looked up at him, I smiled and said, “Better late than never!” And he just grinned (a little sternly, as I remember) and said, “Better never late!” I always remembered that, and from then on, I was much more mindful of the clock.

Aren’t you glad God is never late? Although it may not seem so when we’re facing a crisis of some sort, He is never late, and He is never early — He is always on time, and He knows exactly what we need before we even ask it (Matt. 6:8).

Many times, He acts without us even knowing we need Him to do it. Think about the “near misses” you’ve encountered on the highways of life — literally and figuratively. You didn’t even have time to pray, but God (my two favorite words in the Bible) took care of you, didn’t He?

God always answers the prayers of His children, and we love it when those answers are immediate, like the “near misses,”… but sometimes He says, “No.” Those are hard answers to hear, but later, He almost always shows us why that was the very best answer for us at that time.

Then there’s the third answer, and it is usually the hardest to hear: “Wait, My Child.” We always want Him to fix our problem right now, but He has a bigger plan, and He may want us to walk with Him through the problem and not around it. Those are the times we grow the most, and growth isn’t always easy, is it?

I heard something a long time ago that often makes waiting easier for me: “When you can’t trace His hand (understand what He is doing or not doing), trust His heart (and know that He “works all things together for good for those who love the Lord” Rom. 8:28 and that He loves you “with an everlasting love” Jer. 31:3).

There are those times when He seems silent, and we don’t know why, but it’s like Priscilla Shirer said in Discerning the Voice of God, “Think about a GPS — it’ll tell you to drive down the highway for however many miles, and you won’t hear from it again until another turn is coming up. That means we’re to just stay on that road until we’re given further instructions.” The GPS is still there, but we’re on a “need-to-know basis,” and it doesn’t explain why everything we see on the side of the ride during the journey is there. It just gets us to where we need to go.

So, when I don’t hear from God, I just keep doing the last thing He told me to do, and I know I’ll get to where He wants me to go. And I trust Him because I know “He makes all things beautiful… in His (never early and never late, always on) time!” (Eccl. 3:11).