The Longest Way Round: Why God’s Delays Are Often His Shortcuts

There is an old proverb that the longest way round is the shortest way home, and like most old proverbs it has the irritating quality of being true. It irritates us because we have built an entire civilization upon the opposite assumption. We believe in the straight line. We believe in the express lane, the overnight parcel, and the shortcut across the parking lot. We have installed in our automobiles a small voice whose sole vocation is to shave four minutes from a journey, and we obey it with a devotion our grandfathers reserved for Scripture.

And so, when God does not answer by Thursday, we conclude that something has gone wrong. The prayer has been lost in transit. The promise has been misrouted. We stand at the window of heaven like a man awaiting a package, checking and rechecking, quite certain that the Almighty has mislaid our address.

But I have come to suspect that we have misread the map altogether. For what we call a delay is very often the fast way, and what we call the fast way is very often no way at all.

The Geometry of Mountains

Every schoolboy learns that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It is a perfectly sound piece of geometry, and it holds true everywhere except on mountains, which is to say everywhere that a man must actually climb.

Anyone who has driven a mountain road knows the peculiar exasperation of the switchback. You can see the summit. It sits directly above you, close enough to be insulting. And yet the road turns away from it, wandering left when the goal lies plainly to the right, doubling back upon itself like a man who has forgotten his hat. The impatient traveler mutters that the engineers were fools. But the engineers were not fools. They knew that the straight line up a mountain is not a road at all but a cliff, and that the man who insists upon it will arrive nowhere, though he will get there very quickly indeed.

The winding road is not the slow way up the mountain. It is the only way up the mountain. And the only way is, by any honest arithmetic, the fastest.

The Road God Refused

Scripture understood this long before the engineers did. Tucked into the thirteenth chapter of Exodus is one of the most quietly astonishing sentences in the Bible. When Pharaoh at last let the people go, we are told that God did not lead them by the road through the land of the Philistines, “although that was near.” The sacred writer goes out of his way to inform us that a shortcut existed, that it was well known, and that God, in full possession of the map, declined to take it.

He even tells us why. The people might see war, lose heart, and return to Egypt. These were men who had been slaves the week before. They had the legs of free men and the hearts of captives, and the first glimpse of a Philistine army would have sent them sprinting back to their chains. The near road was near to only one thing, and that thing was Egypt. The shortest route to the Promised Land was in fact the express route back to bondage.

So God led them the long way round, toward the sea, into what looked for all the world like a dead end and turned out to be a door. And consider what lay along that detour: the waters standing up like walls, the song on the far shore, the mountain wrapped in fire, the giving of the Law. Had Israel taken the shortcut, they would have missed the very things that made them Israel. The detour was not an interruption of the journey. It was the journey.

It is only fair to add that the forty years came later, and were not God’s idea. From Sinai to the edge of the Promised Land was a walk of some eleven days, which the travelers themselves stretched into four decades by refusing to trust their Guide. There are delays of God’s making and delays of our own, and a wise man learns to tell the one from the other.

The Lord Who Lingered

But the strangest delay in all the Bible belongs to Bethany. Lazarus is dying, and his sisters send word to the one Person in the world who can do something about it. What follows is a sentence no sensible author would have invented. John tells us that Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, and that therefore, when He heard the news, He stayed two days longer in the place where He was.

Therefore. Not “nevertheless.” Not “in spite of His love.” The love is given as the reason for the lingering.

By the time He arrives, Lazarus has been four days in the tomb, and each sister greets Him with the same words, which may be the most honest prayer in the Gospels: Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. We have all prayed it. If You had come when I called. If You had moved when I asked. If You had only kept to my timetable.

But they had asked for a healing, and He had come to give a resurrection. A healing would have been quicker by a few days and smaller by an eternity. They would have received their brother back and never learned that the Man at their table was Himself the Resurrection and the Life. And notice that He did not rebuke their grief, nor deliver a lecture on patience. He wept. The God who delays is not a God who is indifferent. He stands at the tomb with tears on His face, knowing all the while what He is about to do.

The Long Apprenticeships

Once you have noticed the pattern, you find it everywhere. Moses tried the shortcut first: he struck down an Egyptian and attempted to deliver Israel in an afternoon with his own fist. It purchased him forty years of keeping sheep in Midian, which is to say forty years of learning the very wilderness through which he would one day lead a nation. David was anointed king as a boy and promptly sent back to the flock, and after that to the caves. Paul, struck down in glory on the Damascus road, vanished into Arabia and long years of obscurity before the Church ever sent him out.

And our Lord Himself, with a world to save and a single lifetime in which to save it, spent thirty years in a carpenter’s shop for three years of preaching. Ten years of sawdust for every year of sermons. If ever a man had cause to hurry, it was He. And He did not hurry.

Why the Shortcut Is Slow

Here is the secret that the hurried soul never grasps: the thing we arrive at too early must always be gone back for. The house built in haste is built twice. The fruit plucked green is not eaten sooner; it is merely not eaten. Saul received his crown without a single night in a cave, and he could not keep it. David learned in the wilderness what Saul never learned in the palace, and his throne endured.

Abraham and Sarah knew this to their sorrow. Weary of waiting for the promised son, they contrived a quicker arrangement through Hagar, and the shortcut of one impatient season produced a grief that outlasted them both. The promise came anyway, at the appointed time, to a couple old enough to laugh at it.

We imagine that God is slow in changing our circumstances. But God is not chiefly at work on our circumstances. He is at work on us, and He knows that a blessing delivered to a soul unready for it is only a calamity with a ribbon tied round it. The delay is not the empty space between us and the gift. The delay is the making of someone able to receive it.

St. Peter, answering those who mocked the Lord for taking so long, says that He is not slow as some men count slowness, but patient. What we take for tardiness is mercy, working at the only pace at which a human soul can be made.

The View from the Summit

I do not say this lightly, nor do I pretend that every delay arrives with an explanation attached. Martha had none for four days. Some switchbacks cannot be understood from the road at all, but only from the summit, and some summits lie on the far side of the grave. Faith is not the possession of the map. It is trust in the One who drew it.

So the next time the road turns away from the summit, when the door stays shut, the calling tarries, and the prayer of years goes unanswered, resist the ancient temptation to conclude that the Engineer is a fool, or asleep, or has forgotten that you are on the road at all.

Perhaps you are not behind schedule. Perhaps you are precisely where the fastest road runs. The straight line you wanted was a cliff. The shortcut you begged for led back to Egypt. And the long, winding, maddening way you are traveling now may be, in the strict arithmetic of heaven, the quickest route there is.

For the longest way round really is the shortest way home. And the One who leads us is not merely a guide along the road. He told us so Himself: He is the Way. And the Way, however it winds, has never yet failed to arrive.

~The Seeker’s Quill