Reading God's Pace as Lateness

Some of your hurry is not yours.

I want to say that early because it is the whole article, and because it is the piece almost nobody names when they talk about being busy.

Look at what you have been rushing on. Go past the ordinary items, the school run and the shopping. Some of what you are carrying is a thing you have been quietly covering for.

There is a prayer that has not been answered yet. There is a person who has not come back yet. There is a door that has not opened yet, and there is a promise you believe is real, and it has taken longer than you had any reason to expect.

And somewhere in there, without ever making a decision about it, you started making up the difference.

You got faster. You added things. You started doing, at speed, work that you would not have called your own work three years ago. Not because anybody told you to. Because a thing you were sure of has not arrived, and a person who trusts God and cannot see movement will very often start supplying the movement themselves.

That is not rebellion. Nobody would call it that from the outside. It looks like faithfulness, and it feels like faithfulness, and it is exhausting in a way ordinary busyness never is, because underneath it is a small terrible thought that never gets said out loud: that if I stop, nothing happens.

The vision has an appointed time

There is a line in Habakkuk that was written to somebody in exactly this condition, and it is blunter than most people remember.

For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry. (Habakkuk 2:3, King James Version)

Read the first six words slowly.

The vision is yet for an appointed time.

Appointed. Not delayed. Not stuck, not forgotten, not lost in a line somewhere. Appointed, which means somebody set a time, and the time was set on purpose, and the setting of it was a decision rather than an accident.

That word changes what the waiting is. A delay is a thing that has gone wrong. An appointment is a thing that has been arranged. The same number of days can be either one, and which one it is has nothing to do with how it feels while it passes.

You are inside an appointment and not inside a delay, and nothing about it has ever gone wrong the way it has been feeling. Habakkuk 2:3 calls the time appointed rather than late, and it is the Holy Spirit who is able to change what a person believes about the same set of days they have already lived through.

Though it tarry

Now the part I love, because it does something that most encouragement never does. It admits the tarrying.

Though it tarry, wait for it.

The verse does not tell you it is not slow. It does not say the waiting is imaginary or that a person of stronger faith would not have noticed. It concedes the whole thing. Yes, it tarries. Wait anyway.

And then it turns and says something that looks like a contradiction until you sit with it: it will not tarry.

Both in one sentence. Though it tarry, it will not tarry.

What that means is that the slowness is real from where you stand and is not slowness from where it was appointed. Two true things, held together, and the verse does not try to resolve them for you, and I am not going to either.

You are not imagining the length of this, and the tarrying has never once been denied by the God who appointed the time. Habakkuk 2:3 says though it tarry in the same breath as it says the time is set. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a person hold both without having to choose.

Here is what that does to the hurry, and it is the practical hinge of this whole thing. If the time is appointed, then nothing is waiting on your speed. Nothing at all. The appointment does not move because somebody got faster, and it does not move because somebody got slower, and it was never once being held up by a woman who is tired.

You are not the mechanism, and the timing has never once been resting on how much you managed this week. The written word puts the appointment in God's hands rather than in the hands of the one waiting, and His Spirit is entirely able to take a load off somebody who has been carrying a schedule that was never assigned to them.

Put down the thing you have been covering for

Now the practical part, and it is one item.

Not your whole week. One thing.

Find the item that has been getting done at speed on His behalf. It is usually quite easy to identify once the question is asked, because it is the one with the strange energy on it, the one you do when you cannot sleep, the one that always feels slightly urgent for reasons you could not explain to anybody.

Write it down. That matters, because a thing that stays in the head cannot be put down.

Then leave it undone until tomorrow. One day. Not forever, not permanently, not as a statement about whether it was ever yours to do. One day of it not moving, so that you find out what happens, and what happens is that nothing happens, and nothing happening is the thing you need to see with your own eyes.

You are able to let one thing sit still for a day, and the appointment has never once depended on it moving. Habakkuk 2:3 puts the timing under God's arrangement rather than under anybody's effort. The same Spirit who spoke it is well able to hold a person steady through one day of deliberately not covering.