I Made Haste and Delayed Not

She is not a rebellious woman and everybody who knows her would say so.

She is the person who does the difficult admin nobody else will do. She has sat with two families through the worst weeks of their lives. When somebody has to make an unpleasant phone call, she is usually the one who makes it.

So the thing she has not done for two years is not sitting there because she is defiant.

It is sitting there because she is frightened of it, and the fright is specific rather than vague. She knows what she has to say, she knows who to, and she knows with reasonable accuracy how that person is likely to respond, and the anticipated response is the whole of the obstacle.

And here is what two years has done to it.

The thing itself has not grown. It is the same conversation it was in 2024. But the dread has grown enormous, because dread grows in proportion to time and not in proportion to difficulty, and she has given it two years to work with.

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.

She is now more afraid of the fear than of the conversation, and she cannot see a way to get from here to there.

Read what haste is doing in the verse

There is a line in the long psalm about speed, and it is easy to read as pressure until you notice what it is placed against.

I made haste, and delayed not to keep thy commandments.Psalm 119:60

I made haste, and delayed not.

The two halves say the same thing twice, which in Hebrew poetry is how emphasis works, and the emphasis is not on effort. It is on the gap between hearing and doing being small.

And ask what a small gap actually does to a person. It gives dread no room. The reason delay is treated as dangerous through that psalm is not that God is impatient. It is that the interval is where the thing becomes unbearable, and the writer, who is otherwise very slow and very meditative about everything, is fast about this one thing.

Haste here is mercy on the person obeying.

Your haste is offered as relief rather than as pressure, and Psalm 119:60 puts the speed on closing the gap where dread lives. That is what the word actually does with it, not a spin I am putting on it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an early morning bearable for a frightened woman.

The dread is the real weight

Now the plain thing, and it is a measurement.

The conversation is perhaps twenty minutes. You've carried it for roughly seven hundred and thirty days.

Nobody is going to tell you the twenty minutes will be pleasant. It may go exactly as badly as you expect, and I am not going to promise you a good reception, because promising you an outcome is not mine to do and you would not believe me anyway.

What I can tell you is the arithmetic. The twenty minutes cost twenty minutes. The two years have cost two years, and they have cost them in the middle of the night, and they are the reason you've started avoiding certain rooms.

And no reckoning is coming for the two years. There is no ledger where the delay is being charged to you. There is a woman carrying something heavy who is allowed to put it down this week.

And nothing about two years of dread has ever counted against you with Him. Scripture treats delay as the place where things become unbearable rather than as a crime, and the Holy Spirit is not adding up the days of a frightened woman.

Early, before the day builds it

Here is the practical piece, and the timing is the whole of it.

Do it in the morning. Early. Before the day has had a chance to build it up.

Not because mornings are holy. Because dread compounds hourly, and a thing done at nine has been dreaded for one hour, and the same thing done at seven in the evening has been dreaded for eleven and you will have rehearsed it forty times and made it four times larger than it is.

Pick a day this week. Make it early on that day. Do not schedule it for a Friday so you can have the whole week to prepare, because the preparation is the dread and you know that by now.

You are able to do this early and get out from under it, and the speed was mercy on you rather than a demand. Psalm 119:60 records making haste and delaying not, and the Holy Spirit is the One who goes into a hard twenty minutes with a woman at nine in the morning.