Expectations and Timing: When “Not Yet” Feels Like Failure

Yesterday, I was sitting with someone talking about expectations and timing.

About the places we thought we would be by now.

About the things we thought would have happened differently.

About how easy it is to look at the distance between the life we expected and the life we are actually living and decide that somehow, somewhere, we failed.

Later, I was sitting in my office waiting for my next client when I looked up at the clock.

And something came over me.

Tonight.

Tonight, I would finish something I had been working toward for a very long time—my doctorate.

There was nothing particularly remarkable happening around me. I was still sitting in the same office. I still had another person to see. There were notes to finish, things waiting for me when I got home, and another ordinary day waiting on the other side of this one.

Or was it?

For a moment, I just looked at the clock.

And I thought about timing.

I have spent a lot of my life believing I was supposed to be somewhere other than where I was.

Maybe you know that feeling.

There seems to be an invisible timeline we carry around with us.

By this age, I should have figured this out.

By now, I should be further along.

I should have the relationship.

The career.

The degree.

The house.

The family.

The answer.

I should be healed by now.

I should know who I am by now.

Sometimes the expectations came from other people. Sometimes they came from the culture around us. And sometimes we created them ourselves so long ago that we no longer remember deciding they were true.

But we still measure ourselves against them.

And when life doesn’t happen according to the timeline we imagined, we rarely call it timing.

We call it failure.

Maybe that is one of the cruelest things we do to ourselves.

We take not yet and turn it into never.

We take not now and make it mean too late.

We take a life that is still unfolding and decide we already know how the story ends.

I have done that too.

There have been places along my own journey when I wondered whether I had waited too long.

Whether I had made the wrong choices.

Whether I had taken too many detours.

Whether everyone else somehow received a map for life that I missed!

And there were times when the evidence seemed pretty convincing.

Things ended.

Plans changed.

Doors closed.

Life happened in ways I never would have chosen.

There were seasons when I couldn’t see how where I was could possibly have anything to do with where I hoped I was going.

And if I am being truthful, there were times when I wondered where God was in the timing of it all.

I believed in His timing. I knew the words. God’s timing, not ours.

But knowing that and trusting it while you are living in the middle of an unanswered prayer, a closed door, a loss, or a season that seems to be lasting far too long are two very different things.

Faith does not always mean understanding the timing.

Sometimes faith is admitting that we don’t.

Perhaps part of trusting God is allowing for the possibility that not yet is not the same thing as no.

That a closed door is not always a punishment.

That a detour is not necessarily evidence that we have lost our way.

And that God’s measure of a life may have very little to do with the timeline we have constructed for ourselves.

Maybe that is one of the hardest things about being human.

We are asked to live our lives forward while understanding them backward.

We make judgments about the middle of stories because we don’t yet know how they end.

And sometimes we call ourselves failures simply because we cannot yet see what is still becoming.

I hear versions of this in my office all the time.

I thought I would be over this by now.

I should have known better.

Why did it take me so long to leave?

Why can’t I figure out what everyone else seems to know?

I wasted so much time.

Different stories.

Same ache.

There is often an expectation hidden beneath our disappointment with ourselves.

An expectation about who we should have been.

What we should have known.

How quickly we should have healed.

How differently we should have chosen.

And I find myself asking who made these demands on us?

Who became the expert in our lives whose expectations we somehow learned to accept as truth?

Who decided when you were supposed to arrive?

Who decided how long grief should take?

Who decided when you should have understood what you couldn’t yet understand?

Who decided that changing direction meant you had taken the wrong road?

Who decided that becoming yourself had a deadline?

And perhaps, for those of us who believe, there is another question worth asking:

What if the timeline I have been holding God accountable to was one He never gave me?

Hmmm...think about that for a moment.

Of course, timing doesn’t explain everything.

Some things really are lost.

Some choices have consequences.

There are doors that close and opportunities that do not return.

And I don’t believe every painful thing happens because it was somehow necessary to get us where we are going.

Sometimes painful things are simply painful.

Faith doesn’t require us to pretend otherwise.

But I am beginning to wonder whether we are too quick to pronounce judgment on a life that is still unfolding.

Because sometimes what looks like being behind is simply not being there yet.

Sometimes what looks like a detour becomes part of the road.

Sometimes we needed to learn something we didn’t yet know.

Sometimes we needed to become someone we weren’t yet ready to be.

And sometimes the life we thought we were late for was never waiting at the destination we had chosen in the first place.

That is what I was thinking about when I looked at the clock.

I thought about the younger versions of me who would have liked to know how some things turned out.

The woman who wondered if she had failed.

The woman who worried that she had started too late.

The woman who couldn’t see how all the pieces could possibly belong to the same life.

I wish I could sit beside her for a moment.

I wouldn’t tell her that everything was going to work out exactly the way she wanted.

It didn’t.

I wouldn’t tell her there would be no more loss, disappointment, uncertainty, her husband dying, or starting over.

There was.

And I wouldn’t tell her that one day she would understand all of God’s timing.

She still doesn’t.

I think I would simply tell her:

You don’t know enough yet to call this failure, so don’t give up.

Keep going.

Your life on the other side is waiting for you. But you won’t know what it is if you don’t keep going.

Maybe there is something in your life right now that feels late.

Something you thought would have happened by now.

Something you are still trying to understand.

Maybe you are watching other people arrive at places you thought you would have reached first.

Maybe you are grieving a timeline that no longer exists.

Or maybe you are simply tired of wondering when it will finally be your turn.

I cannot tell you that everything you are waiting for will come.

And I cannot tell you that God’s timing will eventually make every painful thing understandable.

I don’t know that it will.

But I have lived long enough to know that my timing and God’s timing have not always been the same.

And perhaps trust is not finally getting God to follow the timeline I had planned.

Perhaps trust is loosening my grip on the clock.

The clock is not always measuring what we think it is.

Sometimes it isn’t counting how far behind we are.

Sometimes it is simply marking the life we are still living.

And perhaps some of the things we have called failure were never failure at all.

Perhaps they were not yet.

Yesterday, I looked up at the clock and, for once, I wasn’t wondering how much time I had lost.

I was realizing where all that time had brought me.

And I wondered whether perhaps I wasn’t late after all.

Maybe I had simply arrived in my appointed time.

And, perhaps, in God’s.

As always, I write as a fellow traveler—not someone who has arrived, but someone learning to notice the journey while I am still on it. Please visit me at www.bcwgofsc.com or
michellecoreycolson.substack.com. Until next time…

Grace & Hope

Michelle

Michelle Corey Colson, MA, MA, LPCA, D. Min. (Pending)

Psychotherapist │ Christian Counselor │ Life Coach
Founder, Beach Counseling & Wellness Group of SC
Creator of The Grasoma Method™ – A Grace-Based Somatic Approach

“Walking beside you as a fellow traveler.”