Faith That Learns to Trust God With Timing
Late does not mean denied. God's timing often protects what impatience would ruin.
Patience had never been Sofia Reyes-Marchetti's strongest quality, and she was self-aware enough to know it.
She came by it honestly. She had grown up in a household in Buenos Aires where her Italian-Argentine father ran his restaurant kitchen with the philosophy that the best results came from moving quickly and deciding firmly, and her mother, a woman of boundless energy and equally boundless opinions, had modelled the art of making things happen through sheer, affectionate force of will. Sofia had absorbed both tendencies completely and carried them into adulthood like a matched set of luggage: useful, familiar, and occasionally a problem in environments that required a different kind of navigation.
She was thirty-eight, a paediatric occupational therapist working in a mid-sized hospital in Melbourne, where she had lived for twelve years after following a post-graduate opportunity from Buenos Aires and, as these things go, simply staying. She was good at her work in the deep, vocationally satisfying way that some people are lucky enough to find. She was warm, direct, occasionally impatient in meetings, and genuinely beloved by the children she worked with, who responded to her particular combination of honesty and warmth with the instinctive trust that children extend to adults who do not condescend to them.
What Sofia had been praying about, with increasing urgency and decreasing patience over a period of four years, was marriage.
Not in the abstract. Not as a general life goal filed under things to get around to. She wanted a specific, real, present-tense marriage to a person she loved and was loved by, a companion for the life she was building, someone to come home to at the end of the long days and the hard weeks. She was thirty-eight. She had been in two serious relationships that had not led where she had hoped. She was a woman of faith who believed God had good things for His children, and she was finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile that belief with the persistent, specific, four-year silence on this particular subject.
She had prayed about it in every available register. She had been specific, then general, then specific again. She had fasted about it once, which had been spiritually illuminating and practically difficult because she found hunger made her irritable. She had received a great deal of well-meaning advice from people who loved her, most of it variations on the theme of: it will happen when you stop looking, which she found both statistically dubious and slightly patronising.
She had also, in the early years of the waiting, made some decisions she later recognised as the fruit of impatience rather than wisdom.
The first relationship, with a man named Drew, had been comfortable in the easy way that compatibility-without-depth tends to be. She had known, somewhere beneath the relief of not being alone, that there was something missing. Something she could not precisely name but could consistently feel. She had stayed eighteen months longer than the inner knowing had suggested she should, telling herself that certainty was a luxury and that love was sometimes a decision rather than a feeling and other things that were true in some contexts and were not true in this one.
When it ended, she had been more relieved than sad, which told her most of what she needed to know about what she had been doing.
The second relationship had moved too fast from the beginning, propelled partly by genuine attraction and partly by the specific urgency of a woman who had been waiting a long time and had decided that moving decisively was better than waiting indefinitely. By the sixth month she had been ignoring things she should not have been ignoring. By the ninth month she had been doing the quiet, costly work of adjusting herself to fit a dynamic that was not right for her. By the twelfth month it had ended badly, in the way things that move too fast tend to end: with more damage than a slower approach would have caused.
She sat in her car outside the hospital the evening of that ending and had a conversation with God that was more confrontational than her usual prayers.
"I have been trying to help you," she said, with the frank directness of someone who knows the person she is talking to well enough to be honest with them. "I have been working with what was available. I am thirty-seven years old and I do not understand why this is so hard."
The car was quiet. Melbourne traffic moved past on the street outside.
She did not get an answer that evening, at least not in any form she could have quoted. But she got something. A stillness. A sense of being heard without being judged. And underneath it, very quiet and very clear, something that felt less like a voice and more like a direction: stop helping. Wait.
She drove home not entirely sure what to do with that.
Her friend and colleague Brigitte, a French-Australian speech therapist who had been her closest friend in Melbourne for eight years and who had the gift of speaking difficult truths with great warmth and zero equivocation, met her for dinner that week.
Brigitte listened to the whole account with the focused attention she brought to most things, and then she said something Sofia had not expected.
"Sofia," she said, setting down her fork. "What if God has not been slow? What if the timing you have been fighting against has actually been protecting you from something you could not see?"
Sofia looked at her.
"Both relationships," Brigitte said, gently but directly. "Looking back. If either of them had become a marriage: would you be okay right now?"
The honest answer to that question was no. On the evidence of how both situations had actually unfolded, a marriage to either man would have been, at best, a significant compromise and, at worst, a genuine harm. She knew that. She had known it, in both cases, before the relationships ended. She had simply been willing, in her impatience, to edit that knowledge into something more manageable.
She drove home that night thinking about what Brigitte had said. Thinking about protection. About the things that had not happened and what their not happening might have preserved.
It was a different frame entirely. She had been reading the waiting as absence: God withholding something good. But Brigitte was pointing at the possibility that the waiting had been active, not passive. Not a blank space but a space being held. Not silence but a very particular kind of keeping.
She opened her Bible that night to a passage she had read many times but had perhaps not fully inhabited: Ecclesiastes 3:11. "He has made everything beautiful in its time."
Everything beautiful in its time. Not in your time. Not on the schedule that impatience would have preferred. In its time. The time that the One who sees everything, including the parts you cannot see, has determined is right.
She had been measuring God's timing against her own calendar. But her calendar did not have access to the information His did.
She started praying differently after that. Not less honestly: she still told God plainly what she wanted and that she still wanted it. But she added something she had not been including before. A genuine, if sometimes effortful, release of the timeline. A daily, sometimes difficult choosing to trust that late, in God's economy, was not the same as denied. That the wait was not a verdict on her worth or her prayers or the quality of her faith.
It was, she was choosing to believe, a kind of custody. Something being kept safe until the conditions were right for it.
She joined a hiking group at her church on a Thursday evening in April, primarily because Brigitte had suggested it and she had run out of reasons to say no. She was not, she told herself firmly, joining a hiking group to meet someone. She was joining to get outside more, to meet people in a context that was not work or a screen, and to give Brigitte something to feel pleased about.
She met a man named Marco on the third hike.
He was forty-one, a civil engineer originally from Genoa, in Melbourne for four years following his own circuitous international route, and he had the quality she had always found most attractive in a person and most difficult to manufacture: he was entirely comfortable with who he was. Not arrogant. Not performing. Just settled, in the way of someone who had done enough interior work to know where he stood.
They talked for most of the three-hour hike without particularly planning to, the way conversations happen when two people have enough to say to each other that the subject changes without the interest diminishing.
She did not think on the drive home: this is him. She was not given to romantic certainties, particularly after two relationships that had taught her the cost of moving faster than the situation warranted. She thought: that was a good conversation. I would like to have another one.
She did. They went for coffee the following week. Then a walk. Then dinner. Things moved at a pace that felt, for the first time in her dating life, like the pace of something real rather than the pace of something rushed: forward but not frantic, interested but not desperate, each stage allowed to be what it was before becoming the next one.
She told Brigitte, after the third dinner, that she was trying very hard not to project forward and was finding it both difficult and, strangely, enjoyable. Brigitte laughed and told her that sounded like growth.
It was. She knew it was. The impatience was still present, because it was part of how she was wired and was unlikely to disappear entirely. But it had been placed, through four years of a waiting she had not chosen and had only partly accepted, in a different relationship to the thing it was reaching for. She had learned, slowly and with considerable resistance, that the reaching itself did not have to be driven by urgency. That she could want something very much and trust the timing of it to Someone who could see more of the picture than she could.
She thought about Habakkuk 2:3: "For the revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it linger, it will not delay."
Though it linger, it will not delay. The appointed time was not the same as the preferred time. But the appointed time was not late. It was precise, in the way God's timing always is when you have the vantage point to see it properly.
She was still in the middle of her story with Marco, nowhere near the end of it, not drawing conclusions she had no right yet to draw. But she was in it fully, without the suppressed urgency that had characterised her previous relationships, present to what was actually there rather than already negotiating with what she needed it to become.
That was new. That was the fruit of the waiting, as much as anything else.
She thought about all the things that had been quietly happening in the four years she had been focused on what was not happening. The professional growth that had deepened her capacity for her work. The friendships that had been given room to become the kind of friendships that hold through hard seasons. The interior work she had done, not always willingly, that had made her more honest about herself and less willing to edit that honesty for the sake of keeping a relationship comfortable.
She had been becoming, in the years she had been waiting, someone more capable of the thing she was waiting for.
The waiting had not been empty. It had been full. She had simply not been looking at the right things to see that.
She went for a hike alone one Saturday morning, an early one, just her and the trail and the particular quality of Melbourne autumn light. She prayed as she walked, the easy, conversational kind of prayer that movement tends to produce, and she said something she meant in a way she had not quite managed to mean it before.
"Thank you for the timing," she said. "Even the parts I fought against."
The trail was quiet. The light was good. Somewhere in the trees above her something was moving.
She kept walking.
Not because the destination was guaranteed. But because she trusted the One who knew the way, and she had learned, at last, that His pace was worth matching.
Even when hers wanted to run ahead.
Especially then.
"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end." Ecclesiastes 3:11
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