Happy Monday! I hope it is beginning to look and feel like spring where you are. Maybe you would like to rush it?

I have two potted geraniums on my back patio, full of buds, with a little of the bright red peeking through. My tendency is to go help those buds open so I can really enjoy the blooms. But do you know what? I would ruin the end result with my impatience.

Isn’t that like life? I am trained to want instant gratification. But how can faith grow that way? Or character?

In Ecclesiastes 3 God tells us through wise Solomon that “To every thing there is a season…” and in verse 11 he says, “He hath made everything beautiful in his time” (emphasis mine).

Some of my prayers of supplication have been prayed for a long time, it seems to me. Like a little child I say, “I want it now!” Then I hear from Psalm 46:10 to “Be still…and know that I am God”—Who is a very present help. Right now, He is working.

But He will not force the bud to open before time. Isaiah 30:14a says, “And therefore will the Lord wait that he may be gracious unto you.” And the last of that verse says, “…blessed are all they that wait for him.”

Is that thing you so want too long in coming? Has He ever failed to come through? Lamentations 3:5 says, “The Lord is good unto them that wait for him,” and then the word says we are to “hope and quietly wait for the Lord.”

The chorus to a song I used to sing goes like this:

“In His time, in His time,
He makes all things beautiful in His time.
Lord, please show me every day
As you’re teaching me your way
That you do just what you say
In your time.” 

The end result can be glorious, if we “hope and quietly wait.”