For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1 (NLT)

Perfect Timing – Timing is Everything Series – Part 1

Go to PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4  |  PART 5  |  PART 6  |  PART 7

Timing is everything.

I’ve recently started tackling a challenge that I’ve been putting off for a few years, and when talking with my friend about it, I said, “The timing just wasn’t right, until now.”

To be honest, I’m still not sure that if the timing wasn't always right – I just wasn’t able (or refused) to get myself in the frame of mind to face it. And it gets me thinking, is the time EVER right? When is the right time to reconcile? Or get sick? Or go on holiday? Have a car crash? Receive an unexpected bill?

People often say, “All in God's timing.” And they mean well (me included). But really, that's just an aside to mystery. A way we file away things in our mind that we can’t explain.

Is God's timing perfect? Is it appointed? Does he plot and plan time like we plan our next vacation? Or a trip to the doctors? Or when our kids start school?

We view time in a linear way – a straight line marked by seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. We build our lives around appointments at a certain hour, on a certain day; “what time does “Better Call Saul” start on Monday night? What time do we need to be at your mother's by? Can we leave early and save us some time?” We fill our minutes with work and rest and play and mark the time as we travel along it. Time for us is a marker.

When we say “all in God’s timing,” (me anyway), we’re hardly addressing ‘the moment that the time is fulfilled,’ we’re trying to justify and explain away the waiting. Do we wait in God’s perfect timing for his perfect timing? Do our needs arise at the perfect moment, then we wait, and that waiting is planned, just like the time when the need is fulfilled and waiting ceases is planned?

A simple google search turns up pages and pages of people referencing “God’s perfect timing” in response to seasons and moments and issues and sicknesses and loneliness and heartaches that they couldn’t explain otherwise. If you read between the lines, we have a hard time expressing the waiting, the liminal space, and God’s seemingly sacred and secretive schedule.

We use “God’s perfect timing” as a blanket to cover up what we can’t explain, or don’t know how to process, or where to start looking for answers, or our own fear of making decisions. And then we call it faith.

And, yeah, it can be. When we face things we can’t explain our faith keeps us walking down the road titled “God is real, and he loves me, and he is with me.” And sometimes, that is all we can ever know about a certain thing happening at a certain time. But often when confronted with difficulty, we use faith to cover that difficulty up, to leave it hanging, not sure what to do with it. After all, “In God's perfect timing, it will work out, right?” So we leave it dangling, dissonant and neglected.

But instead of using faith as a means to push aside these things in our lives and not think about them, faith should propel us into the heart of them. In different seasons and times of our lives, we face certain things, and we wait for certain things. In both spaces of time, it's our faith that leads us to lean in and stare it right in the face.

Anne Lamott writes,

“I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me – that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”

Don’t use “all in God’s timing” as a lazy answer, a pre-generated encouragement.

Our most pregnant question is not “when will reprieve come?” Hidden in that question is the fear that we will not survive to see the time that reprieve comes. At the heart of it all, the deeper question, the one we’re more afraid of is, “how will I endure the waiting…”

How do you deal with the ‘waiting?' Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Go to Part 2 – How Long? »

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