You Are Not Behind in Life — You Are Simply on a Different Road and Here Is Why That Matters
There is a particular kind of pain that does not announce itself loudly. It does not arrive with the drama of a sudden crisis or the sharp clarity of an obvious loss. It creeps in quietly — usually in the small hours of the morning when the defences are down, or in the middle of a social media scroll that began innocently enough and ended with you staring at someone else’s engagement photos, someone else’s promotion announcement, someone else’s new car, someone else’s graduation picture — and suddenly, without quite knowing how you got there, you are sitting with a heaviness in your chest that you cannot entirely explain.
You are not sad, exactly. You are not angry. You are something more complicated and more difficult to name. You are the person who is watching a race they did not sign up for and somehow feeling like they are losing it.
Perhaps you are in your late twenties and everyone around you seems to be getting married while you are still waiting for something that feels real rather than merely convenient. Perhaps you are in your thirties and your mates from university — the ones who were not even as sharp as you in those lecture halls — are already running companies, buying land, posting pictures of foreign holidays, while you are still navigating a career that has not yet arrived at the place you imagined it would be by now. Perhaps you are older than that — in your forties or beyond — and you are carrying the quiet weight of roads not taken, of years that passed faster than they should have, of a life that looks, from certain angles, like a list of what has not yet happened rather than a celebration of what has.
Wherever you are, whatever form this feeling takes in your specific life — this article is written for you. Not with empty comfort. Not with the kind of motivational noise that feels good for twenty minutes and then evaporates. But with something more durable: the truth. The real, scripturally grounded, experientially verified, intellectually honest truth about what it means to be on a different road — and why that road, properly understood, is not a consolation prize but a genuine calling.
The Comparison Trap: How It Works and Why It Is Destroying You
Before we go anywhere else, we need to understand the mechanism that is producing this pain — because you cannot dismantle a trap you have not examined. And the comparison trap, for all its familiarity, is more sophisticated and more destructive than most people realise.
Here is how it works. The human brain, by its very design, is a comparison engine. We are wired, at the neurological level, to assess our situation relative to others — because for most of human evolutionary history, knowing where you stood in relation to the people around you was a survival-critical piece of information. Status, resources, safety — these were all relationally determined. The brain that could accurately assess “I have less than them, I am in danger” was the brain that survived. Comparison is not a character flaw. It is a factory setting.
But here is where the modern world has weaponised this ancient instinct in ways that are genuinely catastrophic. Social media has created a comparison environment that is unprecedented in human history — one in which you are not merely comparing yourself to the people in your immediate community, as your ancestors did, but to a curated, filtered, highlight-reel version of thousands of people simultaneously, most of whom you do not know well enough to understand the full reality behind the images.
What you see on Instagram is not someone’s life. It is someone’s best moments, selected, filtered, captioned, and timed for maximum impact. You are comparing your entire unedited reality — including your doubts, your struggles, your unglamorous Tuesday afternoons, your private fears — to their most carefully constructed public presentation. This is not a fair comparison. It is not even a comparison at all. It is a hallucination dressed as information.
The Apostle Paul understood something about this dynamic long before social media existed. Writing to the Corinthian church — a community that was, among other things, deeply preoccupied with status and comparison — he said in 2 Corinthians 10:12: “We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise.”
Not wise. That is the biblical assessment of the comparison habit. Not merely unhelpful. Not merely unproductive. Unwise. Because comparison, by its very nature, measures the wrong things by the wrong standard and produces conclusions that are not merely inaccurate but actively misleading about what your life actually means and where it is actually going.
Every Great Biblical Life Ran on a Different Timeline
Now see this. If there is one thing that the Bible demonstrates with extraordinary consistency, across both testaments, across different cultures and centuries and contexts, it is that God does not operate on a human timetable. The people whose stories fill those pages — the ones whose lives have been studied, taught, and drawn from for thousands of years — almost without exception lived through seasons that looked, by every external human measure, like delay, detour, failure, or irrelevance. And almost without exception, those seasons were not detours from their destiny. They were the road to it.
Let us go through them. Not superficially — not with the quick motivational gloss that reduces profound human stories to bumper sticker slogans — but with the full weight of what these lives actually involved.
Abraham: The Man Who Received the Promise at 75 and the Fulfilment at 100
Abraham — called Abram before the covenant renamed him — received the foundational promise of God when he was seventy-five years old. Genesis 12:1-4 records it plainly: “The LORD had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing… So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran.”
Seventy-five. The promise comes at seventy-five. And the fulfilment — the birth of Isaac, the son through whom the great nation would emerge — does not come until Abraham is one hundred years old. Twenty-five years between the promise and its visible fulfilment. Twenty-five years of waiting, of doubt, of the body growing older while the promise remained unfulfilled, of the very biology of the situation becoming increasingly absurd.
Romans 4:18-19 describes what Abraham was facing: “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations… Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead — since he was about a hundred years old — and that Sarah’s womb was also dead.”
Against all hope, he hoped. Facing facts that made the promise seem impossible, he did not abandon the promise. And at a hundred years old — by any human standard, decades past the appropriate season for the thing God had promised — the promise arrived.
Now ask yourself: if Abraham had measured himself against the timeline of every other man his age, what would he have concluded? That he was behind. That he had failed. That the season had passed. That it was too late. And he would have been wrong on every single count. What looked like being behind was, in fact, being on a timetable that no human schedule could have anticipated or designed.
Joseph: Thirteen Years From the Dream to the Throne
The story of Joseph — found in Genesis 37 through 50 — is one of the most detailed and most psychologically rich narratives in all of scripture, and it is, among other things, a masterclass in what it looks like to be on a timeline that makes no visible sense from the inside.
Joseph receives his dreams — the prophetic visions of his future leadership — as a teenager. He does not choose the dreams. He does not engineer them. They come to him as gifts, or as it initially appeared, as curses. Because the dreams that showed his brothers bowing before him were the same dreams that inflamed their jealousy, produced his betrayal, and launched him on a journey of suffering that no human being would volunteer for.
He is thrown into a pit by his own brothers. Sold into slavery in Egypt. Serves faithfully in Potiphar’s household and is rewarded with a false accusation. Thrown into prison. Serves faithfully in prison. Interprets the dreams of Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker correctly, and is specifically asked by the cupbearer to remember him when he is released — and is forgotten for two full years.
From the dream to the throne — from the prophetic vision of his destiny to its visible fulfilment — thirteen years pass. Thirteen years of pit, slavery, false accusation, prison, and being forgotten. Thirteen years during which, by every external measure, his life was going in precisely the wrong direction. Thirteen years during which anyone watching from the outside would have concluded that this young man’s story was one of waste and tragedy.
And then, in a single day, everything changes. Pharaoh dreams. The cupbearer remembers. Joseph is called from prison, cleaned up, brought before Pharaoh, interprets the dreams with wisdom that is clearly supernatural, and is appointed second-in-command of all Egypt before the sun sets on that same day. Genesis 41:46 notes, almost as an aside: “Joseph was thirty years old when he entered the service of Pharaoh king of Egypt.”
Thirty years old. Prime of life. And every single one of those years — including the thirteen that looked like disaster — was necessary preparation for a role that required everything those years had built in him.
Here is the gist: the pit was not a detour from Joseph’s destiny. The pit was part of the road to it. The prison was not a delay. The prison was the classroom. The being forgotten by the cupbearer was not abandonment. It was timing — the divine precision of a story being orchestrated by someone who could see the ending from the beginning.
What road are you currently on that looks like a pit? What season of your life feels like a prison? What have you been through that felt like being forgotten? Because Joseph’s story is not merely ancient history. It is a template. And templates repeat.
Moses: Forty Years in the Desert Before the Burning Bush
Moses is perhaps the most dramatic example in all of scripture of a life that appeared, from the outside, to have completely derailed — and then revealed itself, in the fullness of time, to have been on course all along.
Moses is born into slavery, miraculously preserved, raised in the palace of Pharaoh — an extraordinary positioning that gave him access to the most powerful education, the most sophisticated administrative training, the most intimate understanding of Egyptian power structures that any Hebrew of his generation could possibly have obtained. By the age of forty, he is a figure of genuine significance in Egypt. The future seems, in human terms, to be wide open.
And then he kills an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave, flees in fear, and spends the next forty years — forty years — as a shepherd in the wilderness of Midian. Forty years. Not four months. Not four years. Forty years of obscurity, of tending someone else’s sheep in the desert, of watching the years accumulate while the people he was born to liberate remained in chains.
When God finally speaks to him from the burning bush in Exodus 3, Moses is eighty years old. Eighty. By any human calculation, decades past his prime. Past the age of influence, past the age of strength, past the age at which anyone starts something new and world-changing.
And God says, in essence: now. Now is the time. The forty years in the palace gave you the knowledge of Egyptian systems that you will need to confront Pharaoh. The forty years in the desert gave you the knowledge of wilderness terrain that you will need to lead two million people through it. Both seasons were necessary. Neither was wasted. What looked like the end of Moses’ significance was, in fact, the preparation for the only thing he was ever truly called to do.
Acts 7:23-30 summarises this with striking economy: “When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his own people, the Israelites… After forty years had passed, an angel appeared to Moses in the flames of a burning bush in the desert near Mount Sinai.”
Forty years. Then forty more. Then the call. Then the greatest liberation story in human history. And Moses was eighty years old when it began.
Are you forty? Fifty? Sixty? Feeling like the season has passed, like the opportunity has closed, like the world has moved on without you? Look at Moses and understand: your burning bush may not have appeared yet. That is not evidence that it will not come. It is evidence that the preparation is still in process.
David: Anointed as a Teenager, Enthroned as an Adult After Years of Wilderness
In 1 Samuel 16, the prophet Samuel anoints David — the youngest, the overlooked, the one left in the field with the sheep while his brothers were presented for consideration — as the future king of Israel. David is, by most estimates, between fifteen and seventeen years old when the oil is poured on his head and the Spirit of the LORD comes upon him powerfully.
He is not made king that day. He goes back to his sheep.
The years that follow his anointing include a season as Saul’s court musician, a period of extraordinary military success, and then — as Saul’s jealousy turns murderous — years of running. Years of hiding in caves. Years of leading a band of desperate men through the wilderness of Judah and beyond. Years of being hunted by the very king he had served faithfully. Years during which the anointing he had received must have felt, in the dark nights in those caves, like either a cruel joke or a distant memory.
Psalm 22 — widely understood to be a Davidic psalm reflecting his seasons of suffering — opens with words that echo across millennia with the force of genuine human anguish: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?”
This is not the language of a man serenely confident in his timeline. This is the language of a man in the middle of a road that makes no sense, crying out to a God who seems to have gone silent. And yet the psalm does not end in abandonment — it ends in vindication, in worship, in the declaration that God has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one.
David is thirty years old when he finally becomes king — first over Judah in 2 Samuel 2:4, and then over all Israel seven years later in 2 Samuel 5:4. Over a decade from anointing to throne. Over a decade of wilderness, caves, running, hiding, waiting. And every day of it was shaping the shepherd into the king that Israel needed — the king who could lead with both strength and empathy, because he knew what it felt like to have neither.
The Woman With the Issue of Blood: Twelve Years Before Her Miracle
In Mark 5:25-34, we encounter a woman whose story most preachers mention briefly but whose specific detail deserves far more attention than it typically receives. She has been suffering from a condition that caused continuous bleeding for twelve years. Twelve years. She has spent everything she had on doctors who could not help her. She has grown worse, not better. She is ceremonially unclean under Jewish law — which means she has spent twelve years in a state of social exclusion, unable to participate in temple worship, unable to be touched without making others unclean, living at the margins of the community that should have been her home.
Twelve years of this. And then one day, Jesus passes through. And in a single moment — the moment she reaches out and touches the hem of his garment — twelve years of suffering ends. Instantly. Completely.
“Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.” Mark 5:29.
Immediately. After twelve years, the healing is immediate. The waiting was twelve years long. The miracle was instantaneous. And Jesus’ words to her — “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering” — carry in them the full weight of a woman who endured what should not have to be endured, who kept reaching even when everything said there was nothing to reach for, and who received, at what must have felt like the latest possible moment, everything that had been withheld.
Twelve years is a long time to wait for what should have been yours all along. But the miracle, when it came, was no less complete for the waiting. And the reaching — the act of pushing through a crowd to touch the hem of a garment when every circumstance said give up — that is the posture of someone who has decided, regardless of the timeline, to keep moving toward the source of their healing.
Lazarus: Dead Four Days and Still Not Too Late
If every other biblical story in this article does not fully address the fear that it is simply too late — that the window has closed, that the opportunity has passed, that you have waited so long that even God cannot redeem the situation — then the story of Lazarus speaks directly to that fear.
John 11 records it in full. Lazarus is sick. Mary and Martha send word to Jesus. Jesus delays. Lazarus dies. By the time Jesus arrives in Bethany, Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. Martha meets Jesus with the words that contain a world of contained grief: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” John 11:21.
Four days. In Jewish understanding of the time, the soul was believed to linger near the body for three days after death. By day four, the situation was considered absolutely, irreversibly final. Even hope had an expiry date, and four days was past it. Martha herself, when Jesus asks for the tomb to be opened, protests: “But, Lord, by this time there is a bad odour, for he has been there four days.” John 11:39.
She is not being faithless. She is being realistic about what four days in a tomb means. She is doing the arithmetic of impossibility.
And Jesus raises him anyway.
“Lazarus, come out!” John 11:43. And the dead man walks out of the tomb, still wrapped in his grave clothes, alive.
Now see this. If God can raise what has been dead for four days — past every human definition of the point of no return — then what exactly is it that you believe is too far gone in your life for redemption, restoration, or resurrection? What dream have you buried that you believe is beyond the reach of the One who called a dead man out of his tomb? What relationship, what opportunity, what version of yourself did you give up on because it had been in the ground long enough that even hope seemed unreasonable?
The story of Lazarus is not primarily a story about physical resurrection. It is a story about the reach of divine power past every boundary that human reasoning has established for what is possible. It is the biblical answer to “it is too late.” It is God saying, through the specific detail of four days rather than three: I know what you think the limit is. Watch Me work past it.
The Road Less Travelled Is Still a Road
Robert Frost’s famous poem speaks of two roads diverging in a yellow wood, and the speaker choosing the one less travelled — and that choice making all the difference. It is a poem that has been quoted so often it has almost lost its power. But sit with the actual image for a moment: two roads, both real, both going somewhere. The less travelled one is not a cliff edge. It is not a dead end. It is a road. It simply looks different from the one most people are on.
Your road is a road. It is going somewhere. The fact that it looks different from the roads your peers appear to be on does not make it less valid, less purposeful, or less likely to arrive at something significant. It makes it yours. And a road that is genuinely yours — one that fits the specific shape of your gifts, your calling, your history, your design — will take you to places that someone else’s road, however well-travelled, could never reach.
Truth be told, the most important lives in human history were almost never lived on the obvious road. The expected road. The road that everyone else was on. Moses was supposed to be an Egyptian prince — not a desert shepherd turned liberator. Joseph was supposed to be a shepherd in Canaan — not a prime minister of Egypt. Paul was supposed to be a Pharisee persecuting the early church — not the most prolific apostle of the gospel. Every one of them ended up on a road that looked, from the outside, like the wrong one. And every one of them arrived at a destination that only that road could have led to.
What “Being Behind” Actually Means — And Why the Maths Does Not Work
Let us face it honestly: the feeling of being behind is based on a set of assumptions that, when examined carefully, do not hold up.
Assumption one: that there is a single correct timeline for human flourishing. There is not. There has never been. The ages at which people find their calling, build their success, enter their best relationships, produce their most significant work — these vary so dramatically across individuals, cultures, and circumstances that any attempt to establish a normative timeline is, at its foundation, a fiction. Abraham at 75. Moses at 80. Colonel Sanders famously franchised Kentucky Fried Chicken at 62. Nobel Prize winners routinely do their prize-winning work in their fifties and sixties. Toni Morrison published her first novel at 39. Vera Wang entered the fashion industry at 40. The timeline is not fixed. It has never been fixed.
Assumption two: that what you can see about other people’s lives represents the full reality of those lives. It does not. The person whose life looks perfectly on-schedule from the outside is carrying a private reality that you cannot access from the curated version they present to the world. The marriage that looks solid may be held together by nothing more than appearances. The career that looks impressive may be producing a quiet misery that the professional does not know how to exit. The financial success that looks enviable may be built on a foundation of anxiety and unsustainable pressure. You are not behind them. You simply cannot see their full picture, any more than they can see yours.
Assumption three: that arriving later means arriving lesser. This is perhaps the most destructive assumption of all — and it is completely without foundation. A fruit that ripens in its proper season is not inferior to the fruit that ripened earlier. It is simply on its own schedule, shaped by its own conditions, producing its own particular sweetness in its own appointed time. Ecclesiastes 3:11 makes this point with profound simplicity: “He has made everything beautiful in its time.”
Everything. Beautiful. In its time. Not in your neighbour’s time. Not in the timeline that social media has established as the standard. In its time — the specific, individually appointed, divinely calibrated time that belongs to your life and nobody else’s.
The Danger of Forcing Someone Else’s Timeline Onto Your Life
Here is a warning that this article must include, because the pain of feeling behind produces a specific and dangerous response in many people: the attempt to force the timeline. To rush toward the milestones that everyone else seems to be reaching, regardless of whether the conditions for those milestones are genuinely present in your life.
The marriage rushed into because the social pressure of being unmarried at a certain age became unbearable — not because the person was genuinely ready or the partner was genuinely right, but because the timeline demanded it. How many Nigerian marriages — how many marriages anywhere in the world — began not in genuine readiness but in social panic? And how many of them are now paying the price of that panic in the daily grind of a partnership that was assembled too quickly, under the wrong pressures, for the wrong reasons?
The career decision made because peers were advancing and the fear of being left behind overrode the still, quiet voice that was pointing in a different direction. The business launched before the idea was ready, the skills were developed, or the market was understood — because waiting felt like losing.
Proverbs 19:2 addresses this directly: “Desire without knowledge is not good — how much more will hasty feet miss the way!”
Hasty feet miss the way. The rush to catch up with a timeline that was never yours to begin with is one of the most reliable ways to end up genuinely off course — not on a different road, but on the wrong one entirely. The person who waits for genuine readiness, for the right conditions, for the appointed time — that person may appear to be behind. They may feel behind. But they are not missing the way. They are walking it carefully, with the patience that good things require.
Comparison Is Stealing Something You Cannot Afford to Lose
Here is the gist, stated plainly: comparison is stealing your present. And your present is the only time you actually have.
Every minute spent measuring your life against someone else’s highlight reel is a minute not spent building, creating, growing, loving, and inhabiting your own actual life. It is a minute of your irreplaceable, unrepeatable, specifically yours existence diverted from the only road that leads to your destination — your road — and wasted on a road that was never yours to walk.
Galatians 6:4-5 offers the antidote with characteristic Pauline precision: “Each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else, for each one should carry their own load.”
Your own actions. Your own load. Your own road. The standard against which your life is to be measured is not the life of your agemate, your sibling, your former classmate, or the stranger whose Instagram life appears to be everything yours is not. The standard is whether you are faithfully, courageously, honestly walking the road that has been given to you — with the gifts you have been given, in the season you have been placed in, toward the destination that is yours and nobody else’s.
That is the only meaningful measurement. And by that measurement — the only one that actually counts — you are not behind. You are exactly where your road requires you to be.
What to Do While You Are Waiting: The Active Posture of the Differently-Roaded
Now see this. Accepting that you are on a different road does not mean passive resignation — the spiritual equivalent of shrugging and waiting for things to happen to you. The great Biblical figures who waited did not wait passively. They waited actively, purposefully, faithfully — and the waiting itself was productive in ways that only became visible in retrospect.
Joseph, in prison, did not collapse into bitterness. He served with such excellence that he was put in charge of the other prisoners. Genesis 39:22-23 notes that the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and that the LORD was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did. Even in prison, he was building the administrative capacity and the character that Pharaoh’s Egypt would one day require of him.
David, in the wilderness, did not squander the years of running. He wrote psalms — some of the most enduring poetry in human history, poetry that has comforted billions of people across thousands of years. He built loyal relationships with the men who gathered to him. He developed military strategies and leadership skills that would serve him for decades on the throne. The wilderness was not empty time. It was a school with an exceptionally demanding curriculum.
Abraham, during the twenty-five years of waiting, was walking faithfully in the land of promise, building altars, worshipping, growing in his understanding of the God who had called him. Hebrews 11:8-10 captures this: “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going… For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”
He did not know where he was going. But he went. He moved. He obeyed. He built. He worshipped. He kept faith active in the waiting — and that active faith was itself a form of arrival, even before the visible destination appeared.
What are you building in your waiting season? What are you developing, learning, creating, contributing in the time that feels like delay? Because nothing that is genuinely from God is wasted — not the pit, not the prison, not the wilderness, not the cave, not the twelve years of suffering, not the four days in the tomb. Everything is working, even when nothing appears to be moving.
Romans 8:28 — perhaps the most quoted verse for seasons of apparent delay — does not say that everything feels good. It says: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
All things. Not some things. Not the pleasant things. All things — including the things that make no sense, the things that hurt, the things that look like delay, the things that appear to be detours. All of them are working. The working is not always visible. But it is always real.
A Personal Word From This Desk
Let me speak to you directly for a moment, reader to reader, Nigerian to Nigerian, human being to human being.
I have sat with this question personally. There have been seasons of my own journey — seasons I will not detail here, because some things belong to the private architecture of a life and not to public print — where the road I was on looked, by every available external measure, like the wrong one. Where people I had started the journey alongside were visibly further ahead. Where the gap between where I was and where I had expected to be by a certain point felt, in the quiet moments, like evidence of something fundamental gone wrong.
And what I can tell you, from the other side of those seasons, is this: the road was not wrong. The road was mine. And the things built in those seasons of apparent delay — the patience, the depth, the empathy for others who are struggling, the refusal to measure worth by visible achievement — these are things that the faster road could not have produced. They are gifts that only the longer, harder, less obvious path could have given.
I do not know your specific road. I do not know the particular shape of the delay you are navigating or the specific weight of the comparison that is pressing on you. But I know, from both personal experience and the testimony of every great life I have studied — biblical and otherwise — that the road that looks wrong from the outside is often the only road that leads to the destination that is genuinely yours.
Keep walking.
For the Students on a Different Road
If you are a young person reading this — perhaps watching friends gain university admission while you are still preparing, perhaps repeating an examination that others passed on the first attempt, perhaps feeling the specific shame of a timeline that has not matched your expectations — hear this clearly and take it deep.
Your season of preparation is not a season of failure. It is a season of building. The student who takes an extra year to get the foundation right, who refuses to enter a course they do not want simply to avoid the appearance of delay, who chooses thorough preparation over hasty movement — that student often outperforms the one who rushed through the gate when the conditions were not yet right.
Do not let the comparison steal your focus. Do not let the appearance of being behind cause you to make decisions that prioritise optics over genuine readiness. Your time is coming — and when it comes, the preparation you did in this season will make you more capable, more grounded, and more ready than the rush could ever have produced.
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The Final Word: Your Road Has a Destination
Jeremiah 29:11 — a verse that has been quoted so often in Nigerian churches that its power sometimes gets lost in the familiarity — says this: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
I know the plans. Not you know the plans. Not your agemates know the plans. Not the people watching your life and concluding you are behind know the plans. God knows the plans. The One who designed the road knows where it goes. The One who placed you on this specific journey, with these specific gifts, in this specific season, with this specific history — that One has a destination in view that you cannot yet see from where you are standing.
This is not empty comfort. It is the testimony of Abraham, of Joseph, of Moses, of David, of the woman who bled for twelve years, of Lazarus in his tomb, of every person whose story the Bible records as evidence of a God who works on a timeline that consistently confounds human expectation and consistently produces outcomes that human calculation could not have predicted.
You are not behind. You are on a different road. A road with your name on it. A road shaped to the specific contours of who you are and what you are being called to become. A road that may look, from the outside, like it is going nowhere — but which is, in fact, going exactly where it needs to go, at exactly the pace that the destination requires.
Walk it. Walk it with faith. Walk it with patience. Walk it with the active, purposeful, eyes-open engagement of someone who knows that the walking itself is not wasted — that every step is building something, shaping something, preparing something that will only become fully visible when you arrive.
And you will arrive.
Not on their timeline. On yours. Which is the only one that was ever meant for you.
If this article has spoken to something real in your life — if it has named a pain you have been carrying quietly, or given language to a truth you have sensed but could not articulate — do not keep it to yourself. Share it on WhatsApp. Post it on your social media. Send it to the friend who has been comparing themselves into despair, to the young person who feels like they are losing a race they did not sign up for, to the older person who has been carrying the quiet weight of roads not taken. We share because we care. That is the deepest Nigerian instinct at its best.
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Written by Joseph Iyaji, Senior Journalist, Akahi News
