Sometimes we try and fail, not because God does not wish that we succeeded but because we do not do things in God’s time…
If you try something you thought was God’s will but it fails, does it mean that it was not God’s will in the first place? For instance, you enroll into Bible school believing God wants you to be a preacher but other issues come up that force you to drop out prematurely. Would you say it wasn’t God’s will? That’s what we always say, isn’t it? And it is because we find it easier to explain our situations with God – who we cannot see and whose thoughts are higher than our thoughts – than to place the blame on ourselves. “I did everything possible but… clearly it wasn’t God’s will.” Really?
Have you ever stopped to think that your timing could be the problem? Because timing determines a lot of things; it determines whether a farmer will get a good harvest or not; it determines whether a woman gets pregnant or not, and even whether an animal on heat is fertilised or not.
I will give an example. We can now say without doubt that God willed that His Excellency Uhuru Kenyatta should be president of the Republic of Kenya. But Mr Kenyatta vied in 2002 and failed, even though God had ordained from his birth that he would rule Kenya one day. Why didn’t he succeed? Timing! He came before his time and the mood in the country was not in his favour.
Come 2013, a whole 10 years later and he got it. He seemed to have learned the importance of waiting because during the 2007 elections, he decided to shelve his ambitions and support President Mwai Kibaki’s re-election bid. When asked what made him drop his bid, he said he could not enter into a race he knew he could not win. Timing! Mr Kibaki himself had attempted twice before he won in 2002.
Timing is everything. But you also have heard it said that ‘God’s time is the best.’ You might even have said it to others. When President Moi said “Uhuru ndiye anafaa” (Uhuru is the most suitable) in 2002, he was using his own timing. Mr Kibaki too was using his own timing when he vied in 1992 and 1997. But their timing corresponded with God’s timing on the year they won.
Sometimes we try and fail, not because God does not wish that we succeeded but because we do not do things in God’s time. You must learn to get your timing right. Of course you must anticipate God’s blessings, but you must not jump in before your time. The farmer has learnt to work with God’s time. He knows planting in the dry season will be futile. And he knows to time so that the first raindrops find his seeds in the soil. A day late and he gets everything wrong. Not a day earlier and not a day later. Have you heard it said that God does not rush and he never arrives late?
If God is going to bless you, you must get ready. And pray to know his timing. Failing to get it the first or second time does not mean God does not want it for you. It could be that you are not ready, or even if ready, you are not aligning yourself with God’s time.
Remember Jesus telling Peter and company to cast their nets and catch fish only for Peter to exclaim that they had been trying to catch fish the whole night without any luck. But Jesus, being God, has His own timing. He tells them to cast their nets still and what follows is described as a miracle. They could not believe their eyes. They were in the very spot they had spent a whole night and caught nothing. And here they were struggling to keep balance under the weight of the fish.
Mary tried to argue with Angel Gabriel about how she wasn’t ready to give birth; she was a virgin and could not meet a man in bed before formal marriage. But Mary was thinking about her own timing and not God’s. But the moment she aligned herself with God’s will and timing, the moment she said: “Let it be done to me according to thy will,” everything changed. She immediately discovered and accepted the fact that even if she hadn’t slept with a man before, God was able to make her conceive. And so it happened.
Published in November 2015
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