God Does Not Rush the Seasons

A hillside showing several stages of fall color at once, green through bare

Drive the Western Kentucky Parkway in the middle of September and look at the hills. Some trees are still fully green. Some are at peak, the kind of orange that doesn’t photograph right. A few are already bare and look like they gave up in September.

Same weather. Same soil. Same amount of daylight. Completely different schedules.

Not one of them is behind.

The comparison problem

I bring this up because of a sentence I hear constantly, in some version, from almost everybody.

“I should be further along by now.”

Further than what? Further than your sister, who lost her mother the same year and seems fine? Maybe further than the woman in your small group who got divorced and remarried in the time it’s taken you to start sleeping through the night. Or further than where you thought you’d be, which is a number you made up before you knew what this would cost.

Healing doesn’t run on a calendar. It runs on capacity, support, what happened before this, how much of your energy is going to survival right now, and probably a dozen things nobody has measured. Two people can go through nearly identical losses and come out on completely different timelines and both be exactly on schedule.

A hickory holds its leaves late. That’s not a hickory failing to be an ash.

What forcing costs

Forcing a season along is not free, and I see the bill regularly.

You go back to work at three weeks because you’re supposed to be fine, and you spend two years half-present because the grief never got processed, it just got scheduled around.

You forgive before you’ve felt the size of it, because a Sunday School class told you bitterness is a sin, and you put a butterfly bandage on the Grand Canyon. Then you wonder why it keeps coming back up. It keeps coming back up because one of the parts didn’t actually get done.

You start dating at four months because the house is loud with quiet. You take the promotion your body was telling you not to take. And you stop crying in front of people, which they read as progress and you know is just the lid going back on.

Rushed healing is not healing. It’s postponement with better optics.

What Scripture actually shows

We like the fast stories. Instant healing, road-to-Damascus, water into wine.

But the arc of most of it is slow to the point of being uncomfortable. Abraham waited decades on a promise and got old enough that the whole thing became funny to him. Joseph sat in prison after correctly interpreting a dream, forgotten by the man who owed him. David was anointed king as a boy and then spent years running around caves being hunted.

The waiting isn’t the interruption in those stories. It’s most of the page count.

And this is the part that gets me. God repeatedly has the power to speed things up and repeatedly does not. A field lies fallow. A seed goes in the ground and dies first. Even Jesus, who could have arrived at any moment in history, walked around Galilee for three years doing what looks a lot like the slow way.

I don’t fully understand it. I just notice the pattern is consistent enough that I’ve stopped assuming slow means broken.

How to wait without wasting it

Waiting is not the same as stalling. Here’s what active waiting looks like.

Do the work that’s available, not the work you wish were available. You can’t make him change, but you can go to your own appointments. Nothing shortens the grief, and you can still eat something and get sunlight on your face.

Stop taking your own temperature daily. Checking whether you’re healed yet, constantly, is its own kind of forcing. You don’t dig up the seed to see if it’s rooting.

Change the unit of measurement. Season, not week. Ask what’s different from last spring, not from Tuesday.

Get off the accounts that make you feel behind. I’m serious about that. You cannot heal on your own timeline while consuming other people’s peak-color photos daily.

Say the impatient part out loud to somebody. Not as a confession, just as a true thing. “I’m tired of waiting on this.” Nobody’s keeping score of how gracefully you waited.

The hillside

Here’s what I keep coming back to on that drive.

If those trees could talk, the green ones in mid-September would probably be panicking. Everybody else has turned. Something must be wrong with me. And by the third week they’re the most beautiful thing on the hill, and the ones that turned early are bare and being rained on.

You’re not late. You’re on your own schedule, in your own soil, with your own history in your roots, and the One who set up the whole system doesn’t appear to be in the kind of hurry we are.

Take your time. I know that’s the hardest instruction I’ve given you.

This is education, not therapy. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you’re in Kentucky and tired of feeling behind, come sit down. Circle of Hope Counseling Services.

You Are More Than What You Survived