The clock is ticking. Whether it’s the alarm clock, the oven clock, your biological clock, a stopwatch during a race, or the timeline of our lives, time is always going by. If you’re exercising, usually time feels so slow, and you wonder if the minutes of exertion will ever end. If it’s your alarm clock, you watch the minutes tick away and wish they’d go slower so you could get some extra sleep. If you’re hungrily smelling dinner or baked goods inside the oven, you probably wish it would hurry up and be done already.

If it’s your biological clock, then you’re just desperately waiting for that cute guy at the coffee shop to notice you. Then, you’re waiting for the moment he’ll get down on one knee and slide that cold ring on your finger with all the warmth and tenderness you’ve always dreamed of. Then, you’re waiting for those two lines to finally appear on the pregnancy test.

It seems we’re always waiting for something: the job we desperately need, our soulmate, a baby, the perfect place to live, a purpose, a cure, a dream to finally become reality. We really can’t have a conversation about God’s timing without talking about waiting.

It’s hard to wait, right? If you’re anything like me, you somehow start thinking your timeline is best. You know what you want your life to look like and you’re tired of sitting around waiting for it to happen.

We can’t put God in a box. How many times have you heard that? Believe it or not, when we say that our timing is best, we say that God is lacking something. When we put our wants on a pedestal, we put God in a box.

I could tell you all the things you may have heard before: God is sovereign over everything. He knows the big picture of your whole life, and of the whole world, so He knows what’s best for us. I know all that is hard to understand, so let me give you some examples from my life.

If it were up to me, I’d be married by now to the wrong guy. I got engaged at 18 and was planning to get married until God woke me up one day and showed me what I was doing was wrong. That guy was abusing and controlling me in a lot of ways and wasn’t following the Lord. God rescued me from a really hard situation more than once.

In another instance, I was in love with a guy I thought was totally right for me. I loved him so much that I couldn’t realize all the ways we were taking God out of the center of our lives and putting our desires on a pedestal.

I’m in a relationship now with someone I really love and care about, but this time I’m being diligent to ask the right questions, pray, and discern if this is the right relationship and the right timing to be in a relationship.

Now let’s talk about a career. When I finally graduated from college (another example of God’s perfect timing, by the way), I thought it would be relatively easy to find a job. After being unemployed for a year and seven months, I was feeling really discouraged. I’ve worked a few small jobs and a summer internship I really loved.

When I was offered a more permanent position with the ministry I worked with over the summer, it made logical sense to accept and move to Pittsburgh. Something told me that the easiest choice wasn’t the right one.

It started with a conversation in a van full of kids about a Mexico mission trip I never got to go on and ended with an opportunity I’m really excited about. I can’t say what it is because I haven’t gotten to tell Elizabeth and Abbi yet. But I can say, God really knocked my socks off with this one.

Back when I turned down the Pittsburgh job, I knew it was the right thing to do. Then, when I kept sitting at home with nothing to do, I thought I’d really blown it. I wondered if I’d made a mistake or if God had. I wondered if I’d heard wrong. Only in the last couple of months has it started to make sense.

What if when we’re waiting for our dreams to come true, God is preparing us for a dream bigger and better than anything we could’ve imagined? What if while we’re crying in the pit of despair after a tragedy or hard moment in life, God is using that suffering for our good and His glory?

What if the breakup, the diagnosis, the job lost, or the bad news is God laying the groundwork for His will in your life? What if the hard no leads to an easy yes?

This post about God’s timing has been really hard for me to write. I’ve been putting it off because it’s true that we only know small fragments of the whole story, one part of a big picture. We only get one chapter at a time, sometimes only one sentence. We only get the next step, the next scene—however you want to look at it.

We are little, finite, temporary human beings. God is big, powerful, eternal, timeless. He is not limited by time or space like we are. He is supernatural, focused on eternity when we can sometimes only focus on the next minute.

He holds the whole world in His hands and asks us to trust Him with our tomorrow and every day after, knowing that He knit us together in our mother’s womb and determined the number of our days. He knows our whole story.

Not only does He know the story, He wrote it, knowing our every thought, desire, and need. He hears us when we pray. He knows our deepest longing and biggest dreams. He cares about all of it, but He has the perspective to make the right choices in order for His perfect will to be accomplished.

Sometimes in our broken world, we can make things complicated, but God is never taken by surprise, and every minute is accounted for.

Hold tight to the promise that God is never late, even if His plans don’t match up with our thoughts. Let the Holy Spirit guide your every step, even when you feel like you can’t wait anymore. Be of good courage, knowing that our faithful God is always on time.

Katelyn