“Everything that happens in this world happens at the time God chooses”—Ecclesiastes 3:1
Time. I wonder if it hears us; knows us. Sees us sweating, striving, waiting in vain. All of our earthly efforts—countless creative seeds of pursuit, years of planting—thrown down into a pale drought, hard dissatisfied pits without its sweet flesh, never to be tasted. Water diverted. Toil dismissed. Blood spilled, dried, and blown away.
And at the end of our life, can we coax a few more feeble minutes from our specter of a spouse called time? Will it be sympathetic to loan us one extra day as our last sunset smolders? And how will we spend this inestimable stuff in the meantime, and will it wait long enough for us to make our mark on the world before the light is finally snuffed out?
So many of our challenges are wrapped in human limitations. Still somehow in our struggles, we manage to ignore the One who made us, fills us, empties us, and fills us again—time after time.
We’re told that waiting isn’t passive idleness, but a verb teeming with activity—active with hope and expectancy. I need reminding as I begin another methodical lap in this, the arduous Human Race. And as I wait for something to happen—for the baton to be passed or my shoelace to snap—hoping that this barren season of dust filled with performance-driven sacrifice and sleepless nights is losing pace, an intimate whisper reassures me, “This thing is from me” (1 Kings 12:24).
Everything under the sun—all that we accomplish and accumulate—is granted to us by the grace of the Creator who gives it. It’s easy to forget how fortunate we are while subject to His baffling logic. His sluggish time piece. His confusing generosity.
This waiting room of current circumstance demanding so much of our strength, as well as the space stretching out before us, is a gift. To you, my impatient friend and to my own inner-turmoil, all of the things on their way have been purposefully planted, watered, and will bloom in their proper season. And though the delays can seem stagnant, sit and listen as the buds break new ground and the Giver whispers, Fate is never late. Wait.
Bleeding In Black and White 