The God Who Does Not Hurry

We have a problem with slowness. Not the slowness of our own choosing, the deliberate deceleration of the person who has decided to rest or reflect or step back from the pace that was unsustainable, but the slowness that is imposed from outside, the slowness that arrives not as a choice but as a condition, the slowness of the process that is moving at a rate other than the rate we need it to move at and that does not respond to our urgency or our prayer or our most sincere and most desperate request that it please, please, begin to move faster. The slowness of the healing that is occurring on a biological timeline that does not accommodate the social and professional and relational demands of the life that needs the healed person to be available sooner than the healing is producing them. The slowness of the restoration that the faith says is coming but that is coming in increments so small that the distance between the current state and the restored state seems to grow rather than narrow with the passage of each week that the increments accumulate without producing anything visible enough to confirm that the direction is right. The slowness of the answer to the prayer that has been prayed with everything available and that has not arrived and continues not to arrive while the situation that the prayer was addressing continues to develop in the direction that the prayer was specifically asking it not to develop.