THE CREATION STORY tells us many things about God’s character and nature—one of the most challenging for many (me included) being that He never seems to be in a hurry.

After all, why take six days to create everything when You could do it in an instant? Maybe in part because He enjoyed the process; He did pause to say that things were “good” at each stage. That is a good reminder for us to stop and smell the roses, because it’s not all about the destination. The journey matters too.

And then there’s that one place, as the wonder of everything unfolds, when God pronounces something not to be good. Having formed Adam, He declares that “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18).

This is surprising on at least a couple of levels. First, this is before the fall: God’s perfect creation has not yet been marred by sin. Yet He is saying that something isn’t good, apparently. How can that be? And then, it almost reads like God is slapping Himself on the forehead for having forgotten something.

But that’s not the case. In the previous creation account in Genesis 1, we read that God decides to ^“make man in our image, after our likeness” (v. 26). And to “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (v. 27, emphasis added). In other words, He already had Eve in mind. After all, why else would He have already created Adam with certain working parts that required a complementary design?

Some commentators have suggested that God’s “not good” observation wasn’t for Himself but for Adam; He goes on to have Adam name all the animals as an exercise in realizing: “There’s no one quite like me.”

The not good isn’t bad, per se. It’s just not all good, as in incomplete or unfinished. God seemed comfortable with that; He could exist with the not-all-there-yetness. That’s a lesson we could do well to remember when God doesn’t seem to change situations to our liking as quickly as we think He should.