What It Means to Trust God With the Process

 

We love the outcome. God focuses on the process. Faith learns to value both.

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Nobody tells you, when you first start praying for something, that the waiting itself is part of the answer.

That is probably a good thing. If God handed everyone a timeline upfront, half of us would negotiate our way out of the very seasons that are quietly changing us.

James Okafor learned this the hard way. And then, eventually, he learned it the good way too.

James was thirty-four, a high school basketball coach in a mid-sized city in Georgia, and he had been chasing the same dream since he was nineteen: to lead his own youth sports development program. Not just a team. A whole community hub where kids from rough neighbourhoods could come after school, find mentors, develop discipline, and get a real shot at something better.

He had the vision written out in a notebook. He had the passion that made people lean in when he talked about it. He had the faith, or at least he thought he did.

What he did not have was the funding, the facility, the right connections, or apparently, the right timing.

He applied for a community development grant in 2019. Rejected. He approached two local churches about partnering with him. One said maybe. The other said no. He found a vacant building that would have been perfect, only to watch a CrossFit gym move in three months later.

By the third year of hitting walls, James was tired in the specific, bone-deep way that only prolonged hope can produce.

He sat across from his pastor one afternoon, Marcus Webb, a calm and unhurried man who had the gift of saying hard things gently.

"You keep asking God when," Pastor Webb said, stirring his coffee slowly. "Have you tried asking Him what He is building in you while you wait?"

James did not have an answer for that. Mostly because he had not been asking that question at all.

The truth was, James had been treating his dream like a destination. Something to arrive at. Something to unlock. And God, in his estimation, was a key that was taking too long to turn.

But Pastor Webb was pointing at something different. Something James had been too impatient to see.

Because here is what the waiting years actually looked like, from the outside:

In 2019, while his grant application sat in a rejection pile, James started mentoring a fourteen-year-old named DeShawn whose father was incarcerated. He had not planned it. The boy just showed up at practice one afternoon and kept showing up.

In 2020, stuck at home during a global pandemic with his coaching season cancelled, James wrote the full curriculum for what his program would eventually teach: conflict resolution, goal-setting, financial literacy, and physical training woven together. He had been meaning to write it for years. The forced stillness finally made him do it.

In 2021, the church that had said "maybe" finally circled back. Their youth pastor had moved on and they needed someone to run after-school programming. James stepped in, part-time, and without realising it, spent eighteen months learning exactly how to run the kind of operation he had always dreamed of building from scratch.

He was in training. He just had not known to call it that.

The grant came through in 2022, from a foundation he had not even applied to directly. A board member had heard him speak at a community dinner, had quietly watched his work with the church program, and had brought his name to the table.

The doors did not open because James finally got lucky. They opened because the person walking through them was no longer the same person who had first knocked.

He stood in the empty warehouse space that would become the Okafor Youth Centre on a grey Tuesday in November, holding a set of keys and feeling something he had not expected to feel: gratitude. Not just for the outcome. For the years before it.

That surprised him more than anything.

He thought about a verse his mother used to quote to him as a boy, Romans 5:3-4: "We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope."

She had stitched it on a small piece of fabric that hung in their kitchen. As a kid, he thought it was a little dramatic. As a grown man standing in his answered prayer, he finally understood what she had been trying to tell him.

The process was not the obstacle to the promise. The process was preparation for it.

That is the thing about trusting God with the process: it asks something of us that does not come naturally. We are outcome people. We want the grade, the job, the relationship, the breakthrough. We want to skip to the chapter where things work out. And honestly, there is nothing wrong with wanting good things.

But God, in His particular and persistent love, is less interested in delivering outcomes than in developing people.

He is not slow because He forgot. He is thorough because He cares.

DeShawn, the fourteen-year-old who had shown up at practice all those years ago, became the first full-time staff hire at the Okafor Youth Centre. He was twenty-two by then, studying sports management at the local university, and he had never forgotten the coach who had shown up for him when the dream was still just a notebook and a prayer.

James told that story at the centre's opening night, standing in front of two hundred people from the neighbourhood, his voice catching just once.

"I wanted this place at twenty-nine," he said. "God gave it to me at thirty-seven. And I understand now why He waited. Because the man who walked through those doors at twenty-nine did not yet know how to love the kids who needed this most."

The room was quiet in the way rooms go quiet when something true has been said.

Trusting God with the process does not mean pretending the waiting does not hurt. It does. Delayed dreams are real losses, and God is not asking anyone to perform cheerfulness in the middle of them.

But it does mean staying open to the question Pastor Webb had asked that afternoon over coffee. Not just: "God, when?" But also: "God, what are you building in me right now?"

Because the answer to that second question is usually the very thing that makes the first one matter.

Your process is not a detour. It is the road. And the God who knows where you are going also knows exactly what you need for the journey.

Trust Him with both.

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"Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." Philippians 1:6