Time is relative. What I mean by that is this: the way we experience it is subjective. It depends on what you're doing. Ever been out with people you love? Time flies. Ever been out with people you didn't like? Time moves so slowly.
The way we experience time also depends on how old we are. If you're ten years-old, holidays is 10% of you life. If you're twenty-five, it's 1%. The older you get, the faster time seems to fly because relatively speaking it becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your life! By the way, that is why when you were a kid, a two-hour trip in the car seemed like an eternity because relatively speaking, it was much longer for you than the adult who was driving!
So what am I leading us to?
Well, I think most of us have a hard time handling a bad day. We have a very low threshold for circumstantial uncertainty or spiritual discontinuity. We need answers. And we need them now.What we really need is some biblical perspective. When we look at our lives through the lens of Scripture, our perspective on time changes.
We have a hard time waiting for God to fulfill His promise. But what about Abraham and Sarah? They had to wait 15 years before Isaac was born. We have a hard time suffering for a season. But what about the invalid in John 5 who was in that condition for 38 years. And that's when the average lifespan was 20-30. We have a hard time waiting for God to make sense of our circumstances. But what about Joseph? He was a slave and a prisoner for 17 years before becoming Prime Minister of Egypt. Or Moses? He was a fugitive for 40 years! And we have a hard time waiting to fulfill our calling. But even Jesus didn't transition from carpentry to ministry til he was 30.
We need to zoom out and get some biblical perspective. We think in days. But we might need to think in years. Here's what I know for sure: those that God wants to use the most have to go through the longest season of preparation. You might have to struggle a little bit longer so you can learn some more lessons or develop some more character. You might need to suffer a little bit longer so God can reveal a little bit more of His glory in your life!
What I'm getting at is this: trust His timing. Trust the process He is putting you through, He is never early. He is never late. As we grow spiritually, I think we take a different perspective on time. It's less about chronos-time. It's more about kairos-timing. And for the record, He is far more concerned about who you're becoming in the process than when you arrive at your destination.
Often times we want to see immediate results to our programmes. We put something together; we have the goals in place and we expect instant results, otherwise we get discouraged. But some things that time. There is a process involved. It may take several programmes, several more seasons before the results show up. So we need to think process and not programme. Trust the process.
One last thought from Acts 1: "You don't get to the know the time. Timing is the Father's business."
Not much has changed has it?
