During the pandemic, my marriage of 16 years ended. After I took some time to grieve what I lost and became confident in myself as an individual, I found myself ready to date. While I didn’t expect it to be easy (it had been twenty years since I’d dated!), it was even harder than I expected. I felt like I was looking for a unicorn. I also didn’t anticipate how rejection and heartbreak would impact my mental health.

At times I felt like I traded the grief of my divorce for the grief of unsuccessful dating matches. I wondered, Why did I first have to go through a divorce and then experience so much rejection in dating? I prayed that the Lord would bring redemption to my story and that I wouldn’t be alone forever.

In processing these challenges with a friend, she shared a line from a poem by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which said, “Trust in the slow work of God.”

Ah yes, that was something I could sit with and understand.

The past few years had been wildly slow. The grief. The healing. The rebuilding. Every day I would think about how I had to keep going. I reminded myself that I had survived 100 percent of my worst days. I was going to thrive in this new season, even if I had to endure waiting in the process.

Through it all, I could see God working. I recognized how He took what could have been awful and turned it for good. My ex-husband and I remained friends. I saw my kids daily, even on days they were at their dad’s house. My business was thriving. I was going on dates and each one taught me something about what I wanted or didn’t want in a relationship. I saw God’s work in my life and in the lives of those I loved.

However, when I was in turmoil, I found it difficult to recognize God’s goodness. This is human nature. We can become wildly impatient when we are in the middle of a crisis or deep in grief, and our perspective is bleak. We want a resolution now. We don’t want to wait. And sometimes things seem so dark that we don’t even know that we can hope for something better.

Looking back, I realize that my imagination of what God could do to redeem my story was so small compared to all He did.

Nearly a year ago, after several failed relationships, I met a man who is a perfect fit for me. He is kind and funny, playful and good. I say all the time that I didn’t know it could be like this.

Finding him is an example of the slowness of God at work. I had to go through the losses to meet him when I did. Had I not had those other experiences, my heart wouldn’t have been ready for this relationship.

Time and again in my life, I have seen the slowness of God play out and goodness come, even if it was different than I expected. Sometimes, we can look back and see the way that God was working for our good — but sometimes we can’t. Either way, I believe that eventually we will see the big picture and recognize that things happened the way they should have.

If you are waiting on God to do a work in your life, may you trust in His slowness. Know that things don’t stay dark forever. Light always comes.

 

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