When God Delays to Death

Hi Friends,


I'm currently working on the chapter about Jairus and his daughter for my new book, Reaching for Wonder (pre-order HERE). Here's a snippet of what I've been thinking about as I ponder those times in life when we pray on time, have faith, and trust God ... and yet God delays and death comes anyway.

Here are some thoughts from the book:

I’ve written a whole book on learning to wait well. I wrote it because I’m terrible at waiting, and every single thing I’ve learned about doing it well has been learned the hard way. It’s been learned like Jairus learned, through what seemed like unnecessary pain, through God’s delays, through deaths and resurrections.

         The problem is, death is hard. A subsequent resurrection doesn’t make the pain of hearing “your daughter’s dead” any easier. It hurts. It chokes. It tears through our very souls.

         Wouldn’t it be better if God came sooner, before the excruciating grief? Wouldn’t it be better if Jesus arrived before the daughter died? If he walked faster, started sooner, didn’t stop and turn away to talk to the bleeding woman? Or wouldn’t it have been better if Jesus healed Jairus’ daughter from afar as he did for others in the gospels?

         But he didn’t. He could have. But Jesus let that girl die.

         Apparently, our happiness is not so high on Jesus’ list of priorities. If it were, he would never delay. He wouldn’t tell us “don’t be afraid, just believe,” because he would work before we had reason to fear.

         But sometimes God delays. Sometimes he allows death to come even when we’ve had faith, we’ve prayed, we’ve come to him in time. And in the delay, before the promises, before resurrection, before we know what will happen next, he asks us to “just believe" ... and we are faced with a choice between faith and "why bother."

          It's not an easy choice. It's harder when everything around us says he's come too late. 

          But if we can wait to be overwhelmed, if we can walk past the mourners and the mockers, if we can allow Jesus to “throw them all out,” then we may just discover, with Jairus, the surprising wonder of  “too late.”