Though It Tarry, Wait for It

He is the one who actually did it, and that is what makes this hard to talk about.

Eight years ago something came to him with real clarity, and unlike most people who receive something like that, he acted. Within four months. He moved, he gave up a post, he took a step that cost him money and a certain amount of standing, and he did it with a clean conscience.

And nothing happened.

Not disaster. That would at least be a story. What happened was eight years of ordinary life in a slightly worse position than he had before, with none of the things that the word seemed to point at ever appearing.

He does not talk about it. When people quote verses about God being faithful to what He says, he agrees warmly, and then goes home.

Here is the sentence he has never said out loud.

He has narrowed it to two possibilities, and both of them are unbearable. Either he misheard entirely, which means he cannot trust his own hearing about anything, or he heard correctly and God did not follow through.

Read the third category

There is an answer given to a prophet who complained loudly and specifically that God was not doing what He had said, and the answer contains a word we skip.

For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.Habakkuk 2:3

Though it tarry.

That is the third category and it is the one you've not had. Not the vision was false. Not God has failed. A third state, named explicitly, in which a true word is genuinely late by every human measure and is still coming.

And notice the verse admits the tarrying. It does not pretend the delay is imaginary or that a spiritual person would not notice it. It says: yes, it tarries, and you must wait for it, and it will not fail.

The delay is written into the answer rather than explained away.

Your word can be true and late at the same time, and Habakkuk 2:3 names that state directly rather than pretending it away. That is what the word actually supplies, not a category I am inventing to comfort you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who holds a man steady inside an appointed time he cannot see.

Obedience was not a transaction

Now the plain thing, and it needs saying to you specifically because you're the one who moved.

You've been running an accounting in which your obedience was payment and the outcome was owed. That accounting is not wicked, and everybody does it, and the whole book of Habakkuk is a man doing it out loud and being answered rather than rebuked.

But it is not how this works, and the proof is in front of you. You did the thing. The doing was real, it cost you, and it was accepted. The outcome sits on a different timetable entirely, and the timetable is described as appointed, which means somebody appointed it and it was not you.

That is not a comfortable thing to hear at year eight. It is, however, a third option, and until now you have only had two and both of them were destroying something in you.

And nothing about eight silent years has proved that you misheard. Scripture puts tarrying and truth in the same sentence about the same vision, and the Holy Spirit is not absent from a man who moved and got nothing.

Write it down, as it was

Here is the practical piece, and it comes from the verse just before the one above.

Write it down. The command in Habakkuk 2:2 is to write the vision and make it plain, and the reason given is so that it can be read and carried by somebody running.

Write what came to you eight years ago, in the words it came in, not in the words eight years of disappointment have edited it into. Put the date on it. Put today's date underneath.

That is not a positive thinking exercise. It is what a witness does with testimony, and it does two things: it stops the word being quietly revised by grief, and it puts it somewhere outside your head where it can wait without costing you anything to hold.

And I will not tell you it arrives. I do not know, and I am not going to manufacture a word on your behalf about your own eight years, because that is exactly the thing that would harm you most.

You are able to keep this without carrying it, and the writing was commanded rather than suggested. Habakkuk 2:2 says write the vision and make it plain, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps a true thing from being edited by a hard decade.