God’s Timing Is Always Better Than Ours

This past Friday, I asked Jesus for a sign on the way to the airport.

And the very first person I saw when I stepped out of my Uber at the San Diego airport was a man wearing a black T-shirt that said across the front: “The answer is…”

I laughed and said to him: “The answer is Jesus, right?!”

He smiled. Then he turned around. Across the entire back of his shirt, in giant white letters, was one word:

JESUS.

I had quite literally just asked Jesus for a sign, and before I’d even made it inside the airport, there He was. Or at least, there was the reminder I had asked for.

The answer is Jesus. And for me, He really is the answer.

Jesus is the reason I’m still alive.

For those newer to my story, my relationship with Him exists outside of any church or religious dogma. What I’ve come to understand is that He simply wants a relationship with us.

One of the hardest parts about having a relationship with God is learning to trust that His timing is ALWAYS better than our own.

I’m writing this from a plane on my way to Costa Rica, where I’m about to facilitate a luxury women’s wellness retreat for 17 women.

17 women, from different parts of the country, are all coming to spend six days with me where the jungle meets the sea.

Even typing that sentence feels surreal.

How did I get here?

How is this even possible when, just three years ago, I was in the midst of a psychotic break, completely losing touch with reality, watching the life and identity I’d built unravel around me, and now I’m getting on a plane to lead 17 women through a week devoted to healing, connection, movement, breath, rest, reflection, and coming home to themselves?

Well, I got a pretty clear reminder at the airport.

Jesus.

Although, if you’d asked me that question during much of my career, I’m not sure I would have given you the same answer.

Which is strange, considering Jesus has been there from the beginning.

I was raised Catholic. I was baptized, made my First Communion, went through Confirmation. I knew the prayers, the practices, when to sit, when to stand, when to kneel.

I knew about Jesus.

But somewhere along the way, I confused having a relationship with Jesus with having a relationship with religion. And when religion stopped resonating with me, I thought Jesus had to go with it.

For much of my adult life and career, I explored spirituality outside the church. I built a career around mediumship. I talked about Spirit, signs and synchronicities, angels and the Universe, intuition and the afterlife. Yes, I always believed in God and Jesus, but the relationship felt very different than the one I have today. I considered Jesus an ascended master, but I rarely spoke about Him or called out to Him.

I didn’t realize Jesus could still have a place in “New Age” spirituality.

I thought He belonged inside a church. I thought choosing Jesus meant choosing a religion, adopting a set of beliefs, fitting myself inside a box that no longer felt like home.

So instead of separating Jesus from my complicated feelings about organized religion, I slowly lost touch with Him altogether.

Looking back now, it makes me a bit sad, because I never stopped believing in God.

If anything, I spent my entire career being shown evidence that a higher power does exist. If Spirit could come through for thousands of people with jaw-dropping messages, to me, that meant there was a God. No question. Spirit validated that belief for me over and over again through their messages.

But somewhere along the way, I lost touch with the relationship with Christ that had been available to me all along.

It would take losing almost everything for me to find my way back.

Three years ago, my mind broke open in ways I’m still trying to understand.

During my psychotic break, spirituality became tangled with fear, paranoia, an obsession with signs and meaning, and my desperate attempts to understand what was happening to me. The very things I had once trusted became impossible for me to discern.

And yes, I recognize the irony of beginning this essay with a story about asking Jesus for a sign, because signs were a big part of my psychosis.

At my sickest, literally everryyythinnng became a sign. If you’ve been following for a long time, you already know how Spirit often sends signs through things such as license plates, a song on the radio, a number on a clock, butterflies, etc. I still 100% believe in signs from above.

But during psychosis, the “signs” were amplified by a million. Everything turned into a sign. Every little thing a stranger said in passing, every post that appeared on my phone at exactly the “right” moment.

Nothing felt random anymore.

Everything seemed connected to me, meant for me, trying to tell me what to do next.

So you might wonder: how can I still get excited when I ask Jesus for a sign and the first man I see at the airport is wearing a shirt that literally reveals JESUS across the back?

Because healing didn’t require me to strip every ounce of mystery, faith, or wonder from my life.

It required me to learn discernment.

There’s an enormous difference between noticing a beautiful synchronicity and believing every coincidence in life contains a hidden instruction meant specifically for you.

Today, I can smile when something feels meaningful without needing to build an entire story around it. I can notice a 444 sign at the perfect moment without believing that the 10 other angel numbers I saw that day were also for me. I can hear a song without assuming its lyrics are giving me instructions about how to save the world. Yes, it got to that point...more on that in future essays.

I can ask Jesus for a sign, laugh when something like the other day happens, take a picture, feel loved and reassured by it, and then keep walking through the airport.

I don’t need another sign to confirm the first one. I don’t need to chase it or make a major life decision because of it.

Most importantly, I no longer outsource my agency to signs.

That’s one of the biggest differences between the spirituality I practiced before my breakdown and the spirituality I’m learning to practice now.

My faith and spirituality today feels much more grounded.

Jesus doesn’t need to communicate with me through a secret code only I can decipher. I can use common sense. And I can accept that sometimes a coincidence is simply a coincidence.

But sometimes a man turns around in the airport at exactly the right moment with JESUS written across his back.

And I still let myself smile at that.

I still let myself experience the wonder.

The difference is that now I can appreciate a sign without needing everything to be one.

Finding my way back to Jesus has actually made me less obsessive about spirituality.

Eventually, I reached a place where I couldn’t think my way out, spiritualize my way out, or control my way out.

All I could do was surrender.

Somewhere in that surrender, I found Jesus again.

Or, more accurately, I realized He had never once left my side.

My life didn’t magically become easy because I started talking to Jesus again.

It was more subtle than that.

It was a relationship being rebuilt through days spent in silence by the ocean. Words spoken to Him while driving in the car when I didn’t know what else to say. A hand reaching for something steady when I no longer trusted my own mind.

And eventually, the realization that I didn’t need a priest, a church building, a Bible, or anyone’s permission to talk to Him.

God is not confined to four walls.

I could just talk to Him.

And He could meet me exactly where I was.

That changed everything.

Over these last three years, I’ve started to understand faith very differently than I did as a little girl sitting in a Catholic church.

Faith, for me now, isn’t about having all the answers.

It’s about trusting when I don’t.

It’s about surrendering the timeline I had planned and letting my life unfold in ways I never could have orchestrated myself.

And God knows, His timeline has looked nothing like mine.

There were so many moments when I thought my life was over that I can now look back on and see differently.

Things I begged God to restore needed to fall away. Doors I cried over when they closed eventually redirected me toward doors I didn’t even know existed.

There were seasons when I was convinced I was behind.

I wasn’t behind.

I was becoming.

And nowhere is that more obvious to me than the place I’m flying back to right now.

Five years ago, I stood at these same villas in Costa Rica and got married. Not legally, but in every sense of the word, we held a stunning destination wedding there with all our family and friends.

I believed I knew what my life was going to look like.

I had no idea how much was about to change.

I would welcome my son into the world in a far different way than I ever expected. The marriage would end. Heartbreak and identity shifts would follow. My mental health would eventually unravel, and I’d spend years trying to figure out who I was after so much of what I’d built my identity around fell apart.

I certainly couldn’t have known that one day I’d return to Costa Rica, and eventually to those very same villas, for an entirely different reason.

This time, I’d be the woman facilitating retreats there.

And then, in one of those twists I never could have written for myself, I would meet someone there who would completely change my life.

I had to return to the place where one version of my future began in order to meet someone who would become such an important part of the next one.

Same place, different relationship, different woman.

And there’s something else about returning to these villas that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

The first time I went back, I wondered if it would feel sad.

I wondered if walking into the place where I’d gotten married would bring up emotions I wasn’t expecting. If I’d look at the spots where we held our welcome party, said our vows, celebrated with our friends and family, and suddenly be transported back into the life I had there.

But the weirdest part was that it didn’t.

The villas looked almost exactly the same.

I didn’t.

We attach so much meaning to places.

The restaurant where you had your first date. The house where you brought your baby home. The hospital where someone you loved died. The coffee shop where someone broke your heart.

Eventually, the place and the memory become so tangled together that they almost feel like the same thing.

For years, those villas were the place where I got married.

Except that wasn’t the whole story.

Years later, they became the place where women flew in from all over the country to spend a week together. Women navigating divorce, career changes, heartbreak, motherhood, grief, reinvention, or simply trying to figure out what the hell they wanted their lives to look like next.

Same villas.

An entirely different purpose.

If you had shown me the entire path five years ago, I probably would have begged God to rewrite it. I would have wanted Him to spare me the heartbreak, the humiliation, the loss, the breakdown, and the years of wondering why my life wasn’t unfolding the way I thought it should.

But when I trace the chain of events backward, it’s almost ridiculous.

I got married in Costa Rica, which is how I found these villas. That marriage ended. The heartbreak and relationship that followed became tangled up in the events that eventually led to my psychotic break.

After my breakdown, I opened Little Lane Playroom, which became another chapter I was convinced was supposed to work out differently. When it didn’t, I had to pivot again.

That pivot eventually led me to sound healing and hosting women’s retreats.

I brought those retreats back to the same two villas where I’d once celebrated my wedding.

And on the very first day of my very first retreat there, I met someone I would eventually fall deeply in love with.

Change one link in that chain and I have absolutely no idea what my life looks like today.

Call it the butterfly effect. Call it divine timing. I see God’s hand in it any way you put it.

I also know I’m much slower now to decide that something didn’t work out simply because it didn’t last.

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

A relationship can end and still have mattered. A path can turn out completely differently than you expected without every step you took along it being a mistake.

And a place can hold more than one story.

That’s what feels so surreal about sitting on this plane today.

If God had answered every prayer according to my timing, I don’t know that I’d be here.

If everything had gone according to my plan, I might have remained exactly who I thought I was supposed to be.

And I don’t want to go back to that version of myself.

I have compassion for that woman. She was making decisions with the information she had. She was building the life she thought she wanted.

And eventually, that life cracked open.

So did she.

But I can see now that healing was never about putting her back together exactly the way she was.

I was becoming someone she couldn’t have imagined.

There are moments in life when the buildings haven’t changed.

The roads haven’t changed.

Sometimes the furniture hasn’t even changed.

But we have.

I’m on a plane headed back to a place that has already held so many different versions of me.

Five years ago, I stood at those villas thinking I knew what came next.

I didn’t.

And thank God for that.

There are still plenty of things in my life I don’t understand. There are still things I’m waiting on and moments when I wish God would move a whole lot faster.

I still catch myself wanting to know what comes next.

But then I look backward.

I look at the woman who stood at those villas five years ago and everything she couldn’t see from where she was standing.

And I remember that I probably can’t see the whole picture from where I’m standing now either.

That’s what the shirt at the airport reminded me of.

The answer is Jesus.

I don’t need the five-year plan.

I just need to remember who I trust when I don’t know what comes next.

So if your life looks nothing like you thought it would right now, please don’t decide the story is over from the middle of it.

You don’t have the full story yet.

Neither do I.

I’m still living mine.

And if these last five years have taught me anything, it’s that God can do a whole lot with the parts of the story I never would have chosen for myself.

His timing has looked nothing like mine.

Thank God for that.

PS. I have a few spots remaining this September for Clarity Coaching sessions (the new name for my oracle card + intuitive coaching sessions), as well as just one 1:1 spot remaining in my 30-day coaching container, The Alignment Accelerator.

Visit monicaimani.com to learn more. I’d love to support you on your journey