Chapter 4
Wrong Timing Causes It
Envision yourself driving a vehicle on a road. You are heading to a certain place. On the way to your destination, you approach a traffic light. The light is on red, which means that you have to bring your car to a halt. The red light does not mean that you cannot drive on the road nor does it mean that you can’t arrive at your destination. The red light signifies that you are to stop your car in order for the other cars on the intersecting roads to move, too. The red light flashed to facilitate and navigate smooth and orderly flow of traffic. As long as the light is red, it’s not time for you to move your car.
God is the traffic controller of our lives. He often directs us in paths. He uses His paths to navigate us toward His purpose. Sometimes we might be cognizant of what our purpose is, whom to accomplish it with, and where to fulfill it. However, sometimes we do not know when to undertake our purpose. In other words, we do not know the right time for us to go ahead with what we believe we are to do. Worst still, we might not even know that there is a right time to undertake our mission in life. As a result, we are likely to proceed with what we believe we’re to do, but carry it out at the wrong time. Hence we personify the cliché: doing the right thing at the wrong time. And the consequence of this is heartbreak, mistakes, and rejection!
When we do things at the wrong time, we are like the individual who runs a red light. Instead of slowing down to a halt, we accelerate to our hurt. Consequently, we end up in a wreck like scores of individuals who were unlucky to avoid the traffic coming against them. Even if we are fortunate to avoid a collision, we’re likely to pay a price like those individuals who got caught by the police and were ticketed and fined for reckless driving.
God sometimes allows things not to go our way so that He can slow us down. This is one way He flashes His red light for us to stop. Yes, He wants us to travel the road to our destiny. But He wants us to arrive at our destinations “safe and sound.” To accomplish this, He has to control the traffic of people and circumstances that affect us. He has to ensure that they cross our paths, not “cross us,” crush us, or collide against us.
Unfortunately, some of us often insist on our own way and proceed to do our own thing. When we do this, we are being rebellious and playing into Satan’s hands. Therefore, since we did not let God’s traffic light slow us down, then we are prone to crash. If the devil has his way completely, he’ll use the accident to annihilate us, but God’s grace, in the least, will utilize the incident to bring us to an abrupt stop. We might suffer life-threatening injuries or heartbreak for a while, and then recover, which is a better alternative to Satan’s plan to completely snuff us out.
Sometimes we might be smart enough to stop when we see the red light, but our impatience causes us to take other routes to get to our destinations faster. Do you know what can happen if we do this? We can get lost in our attempts to get to our destinations quicker. We can get so far out of God’s will such that we might find ourselves lost in things we had no business getting involved with in the first place. In our attempts to take a short cut, we jeopardize our lives to get cut short.
If you run the red light and get into an accident where you incur serious bodily damage, you will need emergency medical attention. This means that you’ll be taken to the hospital to be treated for your injuries. In addition, you’ll be admitted to the hospital for a while until the doctor says that it’s okay for you to go home. If you factor in the time that elapsed from the time of the accident to the time you recovered from your injuries in the hospital, you would realize that you wasted more time than you wanted to save when you ran the red light.
If you took another route and got lost, you would need to get a map or seek direction from someone to get you back on track. In the process, you wasted more time than you would have had you just waited patiently for the light to turn green. So, in an effort to get ahead, you got behind. This is one of the reasons why things don’t happen for us as quickly as we want them to. We are trying to speed things up while God is trying to slow us down. Slow and steady wins the race; fast and unsteady gets disgraced.[1]