When God Shows Up 15 Years Late

When your toddler bounds into the room, a grin spread across his face, and announces, “I have a surprise for you!” You have a fifty-percent chance he colored you a beautiful picture on construction paper and a fifty-percent chance he drew a mural in poop on his bedroom wall.

The week before Thanksgiving my husband, with my support, applied for a new job. If he were to receive a job offer, we’d have to move. The chances of all this happening felt pretty distant. Even if it did, it’d take weeks for them to set up interviews and make an offer. We’d have plenty of time to adjust to the idea and make our plans.

Then God bound into the room, a grin spread across His face, and said, “I have a surprise for you!”

In less than twenty-four hours the company scheduled a phone interview, held the interview, and offered my husband a job. TA-DA! Our entire world turned upside down.

We’d never been opposed to the idea of moving away from our hometowns. When my husband finished college we’d been married for just over three years. We opened our hands and told God we’d go wherever He led us.

To show God we were serious about going wherever I interviewed three times for a position with a nuclear power plant six hours away. My husband spent two days applying to jobs all over Nashville. After years of waiting for our lives to start things were finally starting to move, and we expected that would entail moving cities. Only it didn’t.

In the end, my husband received a job offer twenty-minutes from where we lived. The organization where I worked gave me a substantial pay raise. God’s intentions, where He wanted us, were clear. And we couldn’t have been happier.

A year later we were expecting our first child and thrilled to be living near both our parents. We eventually bought a house. Our friend group expanded and relationships cemented. We have a history with the people around us. We’ve raised our children together.

I’ve spent years getting to know my kids’ teachers and I even served on the PTO one year. I built a business and joined a community.

God planted us here, and we bloomed for fifteen years.

Now, we’re moving.

When I originally wrote this post we hadn’t even told our kids about the move. It took days for me to process the idea. Who am I kidding? It’s taken months to process this. I thought I had time to say my goodbyes and transition from one place to another but this sudden quarantine accelerated our timeline.

All the cliches have run through my mind.

God’s never early, and He’s never late, He’s always right on time.

God’s timing isn’t man’s timing.

Sometimes God says yes. Sometimes God says no. Sometimes God says wait wait wait.

For years I thought moving was a no. And we were happy with it. A few days before the job offer I sat in my recliner with my feet propped up discussing the potential of a move with my husband when it was still a fuzzy, vague idea that would never happen. We were content and comfortable. We never pushed back on God’s “no” so many years ago.

And we won’t push back on his sudden “yes” now. It’s a lot to process. In fact, I wrote this blog in mid-November. Before very many people knew and at a time when I could barely wrap my mind around it myself.

Since then God has paved a path forward for us. Our house sold a month earlier than we planned to list it with a realtor. We found a house that our whole family loved in a beautiful neighborhood. Even with social distancing, the neighbors have welcomed us.

No, God isn’t really late. He’s just later than I expected.

A firm reminder that sometimes God’s “no” is more of a “not right now.”