Patience, Please

As for God, His way is perfect.

Psalm 18:30

Nothing is harder than praying and waiting. But God answers prayer and fulfills promises in His time, not in ours. Our times are in His hands. One man earnestly prayed for his child about a certain matter involving a phone call, but the Lord allowed the exact opposite of what he had requested. He was bewildered and angry, but that morning’s Bible reading took him to Psalm 18, and God gave him verse 30: “As for God, His way is perfect.” The Lord was working in His own way, on His own timetable.

Ruth Graham once said, “How often has God said no to my earnest prayers that He might answer my deepest longings, give me something more, something better.”

The great church father Augustine came to the Lord after years of waywardness. His mother, Monica, prayed for him unceasingly, once begging God not to let Augustine go to Italy. Augustine went anyway—and there he was saved. Augustine later wrote, “Thou, taking Thy own secret counsel and noting the real point of her desire, didst not grant what she was then asking in order to grant to her the thing that she had always been asking.”

Don’t grow discouraged. Keep praying. Your times are in God’s hands, and His ways are perfect.