Why Does It Feel Like I'm Running Out of Time to Do What God Called Me To Do?

By Angela D. Thomas, DrPH, MPH, MBA

You're not running out of time. You're in preparation. God spent thirty hidden years getting Jesus ready for three years of ministry, which means the long, quiet stretch you're standing in isn't God forgetting your purpose. It's God building it.

Let me talk to the woman who feels behind. You had a picture of where you'd be by now, and you are not there, and every birthday feels less like a celebration and more like a countdown. Everybody else looks like they already arrived, and you're still sitting in the waiting room wondering if God skipped over your name.

Stay with me, because I've got good news that's been hiding in plain sight in the life of Jesus this whole time.

We love to celebrate the three years of Jesus' ministry. The miracles, the teaching, the cross, the resurrection. But do you realize the Son of God spent thirty years getting ready before He preached a single sermon? Thirty years of preparation for three years of purpose. That's the part we skip right over, and honestly, that's the amazing part.

What Does the Bible Say About the Hidden Years Before Your Purpose?

It says almost nothing, and that is exactly the point. The Bible gives us His birth, one story at twelve years old, and then it goes quiet until He's thirty. Luke 3:23 (NKJV) says, "Now Jesus Himself began His ministry at about thirty years of age." Everything the world remembers Him for happened after thirty. The whole eighteen-year stretch between twelve and thirty got summed up in one verse. Luke 2:52 (NKJV) says, "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men." That was the assignment for almost two decades. Grow. Increase. Get ready.

If God had His own Son sit in preparation that long, why in the world do we think our season should already be over?

You Are Not Late, You Are Loading

Let me give you some folks whose names you already know. I did the research on every one of them. Morgan Freeman, who most of us think has just always been old, didn't really pop off until around fifty-two, with Driving Miss Daisy and Glory. He was actually nominated for an Academy Award at around fifty, and it was that nomination that made everything else pop off. Betty White was fifty-one at the Mary Tyler Moore Show and sixty-three at Golden Girls. Viola Davis was forty-three when that snot cry in the movie Doubt put her on the map. Lucille Ball was forty at I Love Lucy. Kathy Bates was forty-five when Misery came out. And Harrison Ford got so discouraged with all the little nothing roles that he actually became a carpenter at thirty-five, right before he got Star Wars. Hold onto that carpenter detail, because it's going to matter this week.

Here's what I need you to see. Not one of those names arrived out of nowhere. Every single one of them had decades of receipts. Morgan Freeman was on Broadway. Betty White was on the radio and in game shows before she was ever the Betty White we know. Viola Davis trained and did a whole lot of theater. Harrison Ford took little bitty roles nobody remembers. Radio, stages, forgettable parts, training and rehearsing and showing up when nobody was clapping. We meet them at the mountaintop and assume somebody dropped them there. They didn't get dropped. They climbed, quietly, for years and years, and then the world finally looked up.

That is what preparation looks like. It is not punishment, and it is not God being slow. Kevin Hart said it best. Everybody wants to be famous, but everybody don't want to do the work. We want the thing without the preparation the thing requires.

Why Would God Make Me Wait This Long?

Because the wait is doing something in you that the win never could. Galatians 4:4 (NKJV) says, "But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law." The fullness of the time. God wasn't watching a clock and running late. He was filling up the time until it was ripe, and then He moved. Your purpose has a fullness of time too, and God is not about to release you into it half-baked just because you got impatient.

So I need you to make a decision about the season you're standing in. You can spend it frustrated, comparing your chapter one to somebody else's chapter twenty, resenting the quiet. Or you can get fully present in it and start producing some receipts. Because the woman who despises her preparation shows up to her purpose empty-handed, and the woman who embraces it shows up loaded.

And here's the thing about preparation. It doesn't just delay your purpose, it protects it. The gift that shows up too early, before the character has been built to carry it, cracks under the very weight it was praying for. God is not withholding from you. He is refusing to hand you something today that would crush you tomorrow. That is not a slow God. That is a good Father.

Jesus was not wasting those thirty years. And God is not wasting yours.

Take this to the Word yourself. Luke 2:52, Luke 3:23, Galatians 4:4.

What This Means for You

What would actually change about the season you're in right now if you truly believed you were being prepared, not passed over?

This is the first post in a five part series called The Amazing 30, where we walk through the first thirty years of Jesus' life and learn how to handle a long season of preparation without losing heart. Next up, we get specific about what you should actually be praying for while you wait.

I teach God's Word weekly inside the SheShed Community, and this is exactly the kind of teaching that hits different when you're in the room for it. The replay of this teaching, “The Amazing 30,” is available inside the community as well. Come sit with us.