The Hurrier I Get

Careful planning puts you ahead in the long run; hurry and scurry puts you further behind.

Proverbs 21:5 The Message

We’re all in a hurry these days. Our employers sometimes breathe down our necks to rush an important project through too quickly, often with poor results—proving the adage that there’s never enough time to do it right the first time but always enough time to do it over again. In this age of instant everything, it is hard not to interpret God’s delays as denials. We want what we want when we want it! Yet the discipline of delay is another expression of God’s love for us.

The apostle Paul was a get-up-and-go kind of guy. He shared the Gospel in at least fifty cities, and would likely have continued sharing if he had not been imprisoned. The energetic apostle must have wondered what possible good he could do stuck behind bars, yet in those quiet hours he was able to sit down and write his letters to the church. In the stillness of a sedentary life, Paul completed what God wanted him to accomplish, though he would likely never have imagined his sentence to be God’s will for his life.

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