Dear Lord, help me to trust that you love me even when I don't understand your timing.

Higher Ways

"My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. —ISAIAH 55:8

I often meet Christians who are upset because God hasn't answered their prayers—at least not in the way they had hoped or on their time schedule. Being patient with God does not mean believing that he is still in process but believing that he knows—better than we do—that we are still in process. Being patient with God means trusting that he is sovereign and loving. It means believing that his love will not allow him to answer requests that don't line up with his ultimate purposes.

We are not the first to grow restless when God's timing appears to be off. Thousands of years ago, God reminded the prophet Isaiah, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:9).

When we know that God is loving and just, we don't have to understand his ways in order to be at peace in the midst of life's stresses. We can accept that God operates on his own timetable. As the British hymn writer Frederick William Faber wrote, "We must wait for God, long, meekly, in the wind and wet, in the thunder and lightning, in the cold and the dark. Wait, and he will come. He never comes to those who do not wait."