When God Is Not in a Hurry

There was a time when I thought faith was something you proved by effort.

You prayed harder. You read more. You tried to believe better, live cleaner, and get it right more often than you got it wrong. If God felt distant, the assumption was simple: you weren’t doing enough.

So you pushed. In my younger years, we rushed to Church, we rushed to Adult Sunday School, we rushed to our adult gatherings, and on and on. With farming back then, chores had to be started earlier, and the peace it could have brought was overshadowed by the need to hurry.

But over time, something quieter began to surface—almost unnoticed at first. The realization that God was never in a hurry, even when I was.

The scriptures are full of movement—journeys, calls, crossings—but God himself is never rushed. Moses spent forty years in the desert before hearing a voice. Elijah found God not in the wind or the fire, but in a whisper. Jesus waited thirty years before speaking publicly at all.

That waiting was not punishment.
It was preparation.
And sometimes, it was simply presence.

We often confuse spiritual growth with acceleration. We think faith should always feel like progress. But there are seasons when the most faithful thing you can do is stop trying to get somewhere and instead notice where you already are.

Stillness is not absence.
Silence is not abandonment.
Rest is not failure.

Some of the most honest prayers aren’t spoken at all. They are lived through patience, through letting go, through sitting with questions that don’t resolve quickly.

God does not demand constant productivity from the soul.

If anything, the invitation is the opposite:
Come and sit awhile.

Not to be fixed.
Not to be corrected.
But to be known.

And perhaps that’s the quiet truth we forget most easily—that God is not measuring our pace, our output, or our certainty.

Only our openness to His leading. For us, things have slowed down, and His presence is even more noticeable without the rushing of our early years. Time has a way of doing this! The need for established religion has less of a draw on me than before, as I see it as a relationship more than self-imposed demands.