Blog – 9-19-19 Timing is everything in life. In football, the timing of throwing a pass and catching it is crucial. In business, knowing when to make that investment is everything. In surfing, catching the perfect wave and timing it just right makes for a thrilling ride! The other truth about timing is God’s timing is not our timing. This is one of the toughest things this side of heaven to wrap our hearts around. Sometimes things take way longer than we hoped, and we wonder if God is listening to our prayers. Then at other times time is cut way too short as loved ones are taken from us in the prime of their lives. We are left longing for one simple thing….more time. It can be a fierce battle as we fight and refuse to cooperate with God’s timing because we simply don’t understand it. I went to a funeral this week of my son’s best friend’s father. His name was Matt, and he was only 52 years old, which we can all agree is way too young. He fought cancer for eight months, and we thought he had defeated it. But it came back with a vengeance, and in two short weeks, Matt was gone. We are left asking why. It doesn’t feel fair. He had so much life ahead of him. It’s definitely not the right time in our eyes. Yet God knew at the moment Matt took his first breath in this beautiful world when his final breath would be taken as well. God isn’t surprised. God’s timing is perfect, even when it doesn’t feel like the right time to us. But how do we deal with this in a real way? How do we learn to cooperate with God’s timing and begin to trust that it is spot on when our hearts are hurting? One thing God is continually teaching me on this journey is to try to see the good in the hard. I have already seen some miracles that have come out of Matt’s struggle. Four young men, two of my sons included, stopped chewing the minute Matt came home from his surgery where they had to remove part of his jaw from years of chewing. He called my boys and two of their friends over and told them, “Look at my face. This is from chewing. Quit chewing now.” And they did. Cold turkey. That was it. All the warnings I had tried to give my sons through the years had fallen on deaf ears. A big dose of reality is what broke what I understand to be a very hard habit to break. My Mama’s heart is beyond grateful for this miracle in the midst of the sadness. I’m also learning from events like this to enjoy every season in life, whether it’s a fast season or a slow season or a hard season or a happy season. Every season is a gift, and every day we have on this earth with the ones we love is precious. We can’t take it for granted. “God makes everything happen at the right time. Yet none of us can ever fully understand all he has done, and he puts questions in our minds about the past and the future.” Ecclesiastes 3:11 (CEV) This verse offers incredible comfort to us. It says it’s okay to not understand. It’s okay to question. It’s okay to doubt. We are human, and we will never understand or see things as God does. We absolutely will question our past and our future. We don’t have to like it. We don’t have to agree with it. But I am discovering that when I trust that God does move at the right time at a deeper and deeper level, it makes life a whole lot easier to handle. And the truth is the more we cooperate with God’s timing, the more our stress will be replaced with His perfect peace. The hope for each and every one of us is that in the midst of our struggles, in the midst of the hard, we can choose to trust and believe that God does, indeed, move at the right time. Hugs and love, Jill