What Only Time Can Teach You

I celebrated my birthday this week and one thing I am grateful for is the gift of  perspective. There are things I know today that even if someone would have told me ten years ago, I would not have believed them because some lessons are not transferable. They have to be learnt in real time, through real life experiences.

You can learn from sermons or self-help books or even good mentors and I have been blessed with all three, but there are also lessons that only come after you have lived long enough to watch your own story unfold.

This is not a post about waiting passively or shrinking your ambition. I believe in dreaming big and working hard and believing God for the impossible and I have built my entire life on that conviction. But I have also lived long enough now to see that there is a difference between receiving a promise and walking in the fulfillment of the promise.

David was anointed as a boy, chosen by God and marked for greatness while he was still tending sheep. As a young man, he did the most courageous thing and struck down the giant Goliath in front of an entire army, becoming an overnight legend in the eyes of Israel. If you stopped the story there, you would assume the next chapter was the throne. Anointed, then victorious, then crowned. That is how we like our stories to move, in a straight line from promise to fulfillment. But that is not what happened to David and it is not what happens to most of us either. After Goliath, David did not go straight to the palace. He went into years of running, hiding in caves, leading a ragtag group of misfits, being hunted by the very king he was destined to replace. He had the anointing but he still needed time. He had the calling but he still needed to be formed. He had he gift, but the capacity to carry it was not built until much later and God in His wisdom let the time between the two stretch out long enough to do its work.

I think about that time between receiving a promise and actually walking in the promise often, because I have lived inside this waiting. There are goals I set in my twenties that did not come to pass until my late thirties and at the time I could not understand why God would put a dream in me and then make me wait so long to see it. I have since learnt that I was not the same woman at the end of that waiting as I was at the beginning of it, and that is precisely the point.

The David who killed Goliath could not have led a nation, not because he lacked courage, but because he had not yet developed the patience, the discernment and the relationship with God that kingship would demand of him. Time was not punishing him, time was building him.

Some of my prayers were not answered immediately after i prayed them. They were answered when the timing finally became right. Looking back now, I can see that the answer required certain things that were outside my control to align, relationships that had not formed yet, doors that had not opened yet and character in me that had not matured yet. The waiting was part of the process.

No one can rush you into wisdom and no one can talk you into patience that you have not actually practiced. You can be told a hundred times that delay is not denial and you will still doubt it the first time you experience real delay, because hearing a truth and living a truth are two completely different forms of knowledge. I had to watch my own life move slower than my prayers for years before I actually believed in my bones and not just in my head, that God’s timing was always perfect.

This is important especially for those of us who are building things, raising families and still trying to chase down callings that feel urgent every single day. We live in a culture that rewards speed and visibility and it is easy to mistake a slow season for delay, but David’s cave years were not wasted years. They were the years he learnt to lead men who had nothing to offer him, to wait on God when he could have taken the throne by force and to write psalms out of desperation that still anchor us in worship today. None of that happens on a podium. All of that happens in private, in delay and in the years nobody knows about you.

So if there is something you have been promised but not yet received, I am encouraging you by letting you know that the time between the promise and the fulfillment is not wasted space. It is where you become someone who can actually carry what you asked for. David needed the wilderness before he needed the crown and most of us need exactly the same thing, even when we cannot see what the wilderness is producing in us while we are still in it.

On this birthday, I am grateful for every year that taught me something I could not have learned any faster and I am choosing to trust the seasons I am still in, even the ones that are still in progress. Thank you Lord for the gift of waiting for time to do it’s work. Next time i will write about heart posture as you wait.

On my playlist this week is Jesus Be The Name by Elevation Worship featuring Tiffany Hudson

Gratefully