God's Timing

Wait for it.... 

How do you know when the right time to do something is? Anything. What makes you have one little thing to do and put it off until the weirdest possible hour? 

If you're like me, you've had these moments in your life. Probably too many of them to count, but if you start trying to remember them, they will come. 

Moments when you wanted to take the dog for a walk, but didn't get out the door quite in time and narrowly missed being run over by a car that blew through the intersection. Moments when you had one little errand to run - to the bank or the grocery store or whatever it might be - and put it off until you didn't even feel like doing it any more, then forced yourself to do it...and ran into a friend you haven't seen in years. 

Moments you wouldn't have planned that way in a million years, but they somehow ended up just like that and became tremendous blessings in your life - gifting you things you wouldn't have had otherwise or keeping you from things you couldn't have escaped yourself. 

None of us truly knows how many little miracles God has put into our lives, how many tragedies we've avoided, how many little blessings we've encountered simply through a little thing called timing. None of us knows how many little blessings we've missed or how many tragedies we've brought upon ourselves by forcing time to fit in our hands. 

But God does. 

See, God has a right time. God knows. Matthew assures us of this in 8:29, just as God assures us of it in other areas of the Bible. God knows exactly what season we're in, exactly when the sun sets, when darkness falls, when the light of the moon will reflect off something shiny we would have walked right by in the daylight, when we need that daylight, when the darkness would be blinding, when our paths might cross and where and with whom and for what reason. 

I remember a few years ago in the midst of Christmas shopping. I had one more gift to run out and grab real quick, somewhere close, just across the street. And after putting it off for no good reason at all, I was finally just like....fine, I'll go. And when I got to that store, there was another customer absolutely frantic because an older woman had fallen and hit her head on the floor and was flat-out on her back and no one was coming to help her. 

All of a sudden, I realized I was there to help her. I was there to kneel down by her, take her hand, ask her her name, talk with her. Figure out who I could call for her. Assess her immediate needs. 

I had chastised myself all morning for being "lazy" and for "putting it off," but the truth is that I was right on time, and my guess is that if you laid my life out on a table, there'd be a million little moments like that. Your life, too. 

Because God knows what time it is, and even when we can't explain why we do something now or do it later or put it off until tomorrow, God knows...He knows the gifts we receive and the gifts we become when the timing - our timing - His timing is just right.