“The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”

— 2 Peter 3:9

We live in a world given to ever searching for new ways not to have to wait for what we want, often to our own detriment. We did not like the lines at supermarkets, so we created quick checkout lanes for those people with only a few items. We put up signs telling people that they could only have a limited number of items because people with more items were slowing the lines down. Suddenly, the people in line for express checkout started policing the others in line to make sure they didn’t have too many items.

Then we made those lanes cashier-less only to realize that the new cashier-less lines were actually slower because the average buyer takes longer to check out by themselves that they if they had a trained cashier to help them. In our wisdom instead of re-examining the value of a good cashier, we chose to just add more cashier-less lanes.

We don’t like to wait. We don’t like to wait in lines at the movie theatre or our favorite restaurant. We don’t like to wait for our tax refund checks. We don’t like to wait in our doctor’s or lawyer’s offices. We don’t like to wait at the DMV. We hate it when our internet service is too slow. We despise having to wait for service repair people.

It’s like our resistance to waiting is somehow built into our DNA. As our lives move ever faster, the more resistant we become to having to wait.

Because of this builtin resistance, we want to hold God’s feet to the fire. We don’t want to have to wait for God to fulfill His promises. Expectations of self-gratification are the norm, even if what we are asking is irresponsible and possibly dangerous. If it takes longer then we want to wait to get the answer that we expect, then we just set off to take care of the matter ourselves.

Doing this can create an independent mindset that is not pleasing to God. God knows if we manage to come up with a solution on our own (even if it is not optimal), we will take the credit for it ourselves. And if what we attempt to do on our own fails, we can blame God for not acting sooner.

God created time. He is the master of time. He is neither influenced nor restricted by time. God isn’t slow in keeping his promises, we are just too impatient to wait for his answers. Perhaps we would be better served slowing down our own lives and working on own patience, rather than expecting God to meet the mortal demands that we impose on him.

The blessings are so much greater when we wait on God’s timing.