He Is in No Hurry With You

"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." (Psalm 147:3)

Some wounds close in a week and some do not close for years, and we have to stop treating that as a character flaw. There is a strange expectation in the church that grief and injury run on a schedule, that there is a decent interval, that after enough time a person ought to be functioning, and if they are not, something has gone wrong in their faith. People have been made to apologize for still hurting. That is a monstrous thing, and we taught them to do it.

Some wounds take years. Some take the rest of a life. Some never fully close, and the person carries an open place until the day they die, and they are not defective. They are wounded. And God is not standing over that person with a stopwatch. Look at the verb in the psalm. He binds up. Not zaps. Not erases. Binds up, which is what you do with a thing that will take a long time, which requires you to come back and change the dressing, which means the healing is slow and attended and repeated.

He is in no hurry with you. So stop being in such a hurry with yourself. The timeline you are ashamed of falling behind was never God's timeline; it was one the impatient invented and called maturity. He heals like a physician who intends to stay, returning again and again to the same wound, unbothered by how long it is taking. Let him tend it at his pace, and refuse to apologize for a healing that is slow because the wound was deep.