Trusting God’s timing

January 30, 2025

AS THE OLD joke goes, What’s the secret of (“Timing!”) great comedy? It is often also the secret of God’s apparent silence or stillness when we really want Him to speak or do something to make our situation easier. When He doesn’t move according to our timetable, it’s because His is the better one.

We see this clearly in the life of Joseph. For the most part, he was a great example of patience and trust. Sold into slavery and then thrown into jail on trumped-up charges, Joseph accepted his situation and did his best to honor God by living with integrity, right where he was.

The only time he tried to force things, it didn’t work out. Remember when he was in prison, accused of trying to rape Potiphar’s wife and two inmates came to him for help in understanding their troubling dreams?

He told Pharoh’s cupbearer he would be restored to his position in just a few days. Then, he added a request: ^“When all goes well with you, remember me and show me kindness; mention me to Pharaoh and get me out of this prison” (Genesis 40:14).

The cupbearer was reinstated just as Joseph predicted, but he forgot Joseph’s nudge to put a good word in for him. It wasn’t until two years later, when Pharoah had two dreams that disturbed him, that the cupbearer remembered Joseph’s gifting.

It’s not clear from the account, but I suspect that the cupbearer didn’t forget Joseph’s appeal immediately. Isn’t it possible that he chose not to mention Joseph, until it later slipped his mind? After all, the cupbearer was probably being very careful not to upset Pharoah. Offering a character reference for a guy alleged to have attempted to sexually assault the boss’s chief general may not have been too wise.

But there was more to the delay than that. If the cupbearer had mentioned Joseph and his dream-telling abilities to Pharoah it would only have been a curiosity—surely not a reason to earn Joseph’s release. Only when Pharoah’s crisis point arrived did Joseph matter to him.

The same sort of thing is often true for us. Those frustrating, discouraging, challenging delays we may face when we do all that we can to master or manipulate a situation? They may be because God’s perfect timing hasn’t come to pass. Or He has other purposes for us in our situation.

Hard as it is, sometimes we just need to accept that things are the way they are because it’s not time yet for them to be the way they need to be. Take the advice of the great Dutch missionary Corrie Ten Boom, one of whose books summed up this counterintuitive response: Don’t Wrestle, Just Nestle.

Ten Boom offered that counsel from rich experience. Sent to a Nazi concentration camp with her sister, Betsie, for helping harbor Jews, the women were distressed by all the lice and fleas in their crowded barracks. Then they remembered the exhortation from 1 Thessalonians 5:18: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.”

Taking that to heart, they began to thank God that they had an unconfiscated Bible to read, and many women around them in the barracks with whom to share God’s love. The insects were a bit harder to appreciate, until they came to realize that the infestation kept the guards away, saving the women from further mistreatment or abuse.

In what may seem to be His slowness or stillness, God might be preparing us for something more—or protecting us from something worse.