At the time I have decided, my words will come true. You can trust what I say about the future. It may take a long time, but keep on waiting—it will happen!”
Habakkuk 2:3 (CEV)
What does it mean to engage slowly after a tough season? It means you shouldn’t be in a hurry. Go slowly. Just because you have the freedom to do something doesn’t mean you should be in a rush to restart it all.
When you are tempted to hurry back into life, here are two things to remember:
1. God is never in a hurry. There isn’t a single example in Scripture of Jesus running anywhere. When his friend Lazarus was dying, for example, Jesus was only a half day’s walk away. But it took Jesus three days to get to Lazarus. And when he got there, Lazarus was already dead. Why? Jesus knew that God was in charge and that he had a better plan—one that didn’t require Jesus to hurry.
2. God’s timing is perfect. When you get impatient during difficult days and want to speed things along, you need to trust that God knows what he’s doing. In the case of Lazarus, God had a plan that was even bigger than healing Lazarus. God’s plan was to resurrect him! But that plan required Jesus to take things slow and not hurry ahead of God’s schedule.
The prophet, Habakkuk, had a word for people who wanted to hurry back to the way they remembered their life. God said in Habakkuk 2:3: “At the time I have decided, my words will come true. You can trust what I say about the future. It may take a long time, but keep on waiting—it will happen!” (CEV).
Wanting to hurry up God’s plan has always been a problem. In the Old Testament, God often had to remind his people that progress is gradual, not instant.
One reason God moves slowly is because he knows that delays make you stronger. When the Israelites were headed toward the Promised Land, they met many barriers. But God said, “I will force out your enemies little by little and give your nation time to grow strong enough to take over the land” (Exodus 23:30 CEV). God knew they would only benefit when things happened slowly.
Globalization and the attendant concerns about poverty and inequality have become a focus of discussion in a way that few other topics, except for international terrorism or global warming, have. Most people have a strong opinion on globalization, and all of them express an interest in the well-being of the world's poor. The financial press and influential international officials confidently assert that global free markets expand the horizons for the poor, whereas activist-protesters hold the opposite belief with equal intensity. Yet the strength of people's conviction is often in inverse proportion to the amount of robust factual evidence they have.As is common in contentious public debates, different people mean different things by the same word. Some interpret "globalization" to mean the global reach of communications technology and capital movements, some think of the outsourcing by domestic companies in rich countries, and others see globalization as a byword for
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