For His ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts like our thoughts.
This year at our church we are doing a year-long series on patience. I think we are all a little apprehensive and impatient about what this year will hold. When a series is done on patience, there will, no doubt, be lots of testing of our patience!
I remember a while ago I really wanted to redo my kitchen. It was one of those things—we looked at our current house and we talked about how redoing the kitchen and taking down the hanging cabinets could really open up the whole house … and then we moved in. And the fridge broke. And the skylight leaked. And the kitchen took the back burner—so to speak.
A year or so later after we were more settled into the house we revisited the kitchen topic, decided to start saving, and made an appointment with a designer to get ideas and pricing for what exactly we wanted to do. I dreamed about my new kitchen! We worked and we saved, and we saved.
Finally, we hit our goal and were ready to place the order! It had taken a year of dedicated saving to get to this point and I was so excited! We bought flooring when we first moved in as we had planned to redo the floors right away but when we decided to redo the kitchen, we thought it would make the most sense if we waited until the cabinetry was installed. Redoing the kitchen was the gateway to getting rid of the ugly, old carpeting and flooring, old countertops, cabinetry that had seen better days, and we were opening up the design of the house as we had envisioned it when we bought it.
We went for one more appointment with our designer to discuss all the details, the exact finish, hardware, and all the details for the cabinets before we placed the order. He told us to go home and figure out a few things and then call him with those details and he would place the order. So we went home and that was when everything fell apart. I’ll spare you all the details but it was one of those times in life when one unexpected expense after another came up, and pretty soon, we were back to almost the starting line in saving for our kitchen. I was devastated—we had been so close to getting it done! Have you ever had something like that happen? A goal that you have been working towards is almost within reach, when suddenly the carpet is pulled out from under you and you have to start all over? Sometimes things just take longer than we expect.
This stood out to me the other day when I was reading about the construction of the temple that Solomon was starting to work on. In the book of Exodus, the temple was talked about during the time when God led the Israelites out of Egypt. They thought they would be building the temple when they got to the promised land. But it ended up being another 470 years after they were settled in the promised land before construction even started! 470 years! 470 years before construction even started, then another 7 years until the work was completed. David thought perhaps he would be the one to build the temple, but his hands were too sullied by all the blood he had shed in battles so the Lord delayed the building of the temple. The Lord declared Solomon to be the one to build it.
Now if I was the Lord, I would have wanted it built way sooner, and probably would have tried to work a miracle or two along the way to speed things up. Many times we want to rush things, to make things happen and get it going quickly. But, His ways are not our ways. How much better to wait on His timing. The Lord wanted to maintain purity. He wanted to make sure He had the right people at the right time to entrust to build the temple. He didn’t rush.
We finally saved enough for our new kitchen. We ended up receiving the cabinets at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. We were doing the work ourselves so this ended up being a huge blessing in disguise—there was nowhere to go and nothing to do so we had more time to work on the kitchen and were able to get it done more quickly which was great because the process of living in a house that was totally torn apart showed me that I am no Joanna Gaines who adapts to living in a house under construction! If we had had our normal schedules while trying to redo the kitchen, it would have taken much longer and I’m not sure I would have survived that.
God taught me patience in waiting to order the kitchen. He spared me the turmoil of living in a torn apart house longer than was absolutely necessary. What things has He saved you from in the midst of teaching you about patience?
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