Sometimes we do not understand God’s Timing, but His Timing is always Perfect.
All who came before you came at the exact moment God planned, so everyone that followed could be where they were supposed to be at God’s designated time.
You were brought to earth at the exact moment God planned.
We can plot sun, moon, stars, planets, and eclipses and see God’s Order. Yet we often miss that we ourselves are part of His Order.
My parents were married for ten years and had no children. My mother said she wanted children. She said she looked at other mothers pushing their baby carriages and felt sad she could not do that.
But she said she knew God had a plan and she was content to do whatever He wanted her to do. In those ten years she and my Father shepherded many other people, always giving, always sharing.
And then after the ten years, my brother was born.
His was a difficult birth where the doctor told my father to prepare himself. It was possible neither my mother nor my brother would survive the delivery. My father paced outside the delivery room and prayed fervently for both. Both survived.
My brother is 87 years old, a father, grandfather and great grandfather. God had more people to bring into the world through both my mother and brother. God’s Timing was still right on track.
My parents rejoiced in the birth and childhood of my brother. My father was a mailman, who walked his route in the old historic section of Charleston.
My parents survived wars, The Great Depression and many other challenges. Money was very tight. They took in boarders for their spare room. They raised chickens as a side line. Like many others, they survived.
As the years passed, they were thankful for everything, including getting the joy of being parents to their only child.
I don’t think it even crossed their mind there would ever be any more children. In the summer of 1946, my brother got the mumps.
My father caught the mumps too. Many times, having mumps would result in adult men never being able to father children afterwards. So if my parents considered other children, this unfortunate illness would have seemed to put an end to that thought.
Now … let’s fast forward a moment. After my father’s death in 2001, I was going through many old documents when I chanced upon his work records.
He had meticulously entered in his private journal the date, time, how many bags of mail he had carried that day, if he worked any overtime and what boss he had reported it to.
There was nothing else there except work data. I was getting ready to discard it when I noticed one entry that seemed out of place.
There in his classic handwriting, he had written, “Pearl [my mother] got a new dress today. So pretty.”
I was amazed to “do the math.” His entry was about nine months before I was born!
Yes, much to everyone’s surprise, I was born 11 years after my brother. The delivery was also difficult and there were questions raised again about whether either my mother or I would survive.
But God had a plan and a time table in mind. He knew exactly when I would arrive on earth.
He knew exactly when I would deliver our daughter. She entered the world a month later than we planned.
God knew exactly when she would deliver our grandson. He entered the world earlier than expected.
Everywhere along the way in our family, there were questions about God’s Timing or God’s Plan.
But His Timing and Plans are always perfect. When my parents were in their 90s, they were in a car accident. As my mother lay in the hospital, my father was beginning to despair.
She reached over, took his hand, looked straight into his eyes and said, “Horace, God has provided for us all our lives. How could we do anything but trust Him now.”
And so my father did the same thing he had done outside two delivery rooms much earlier in life. He prayed. The time came shortly thereafter when my mother was delivered to Heaven.
Today as I look at the pictures of their life and mine, I see God’s Guiding Hand all the way through.
Even when I question where I am, where I am going or when we will get there, I trust God. He is working out His Plan.
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
All the days ordained for me were written in Your Book before one of them came to be.
Psalm 139:16
