“Look How Far You’ve Come”

The words my daddy said to me one morning that still lingers.

Waiting for class to start, I called my daddy.

In the middle of an ordinary moment, he said something that stopped me in my tracks:

“Look how far you’ve come. Delay is not denial. I’m proud of you. Keep making me proud.”

My eyes welled up right there, just before class. Not because the words were dramatic, but because they carried memory. Weight. Years.

There was a time I was home for three years, waiting to go to school.

Three years of paused plans.

Three visa denials.

Three years in a row.

Each year came with hope, preparation, prayer-and then another no. Waiting became my reality, not by choice, but by circumstance. It was in that season that I learned how loud silence can be, and how heavy unanswered prayers feel when time keeps moving for everyone else.

That season shaped me more than I realized at the time.

It stripped me. It slowed me down. It taught me how to sit with uncertainty without losing faith. It was the birthplace of The Waiting Season - a plan born not out of theory, but lived experience - now resting on the YouVersion Bible App(make sure to check it out😉) as a reminder that waiting is not wasted.

So when my daddy said, “Look how far you’ve come,” he wasn’t speaking casually. He was speaking across time. Across those years that felt stagnant. Across moments where progress was invisible and hope required intention.

Delay is not denial.

Sometimes it is direction.

Sometimes it is preparation.

Sometimes it is God shaping you quietly while you wonder if anything is happening at all.

Standing where I am now, I can trace the lines clearly - or at least a bit clearly. Things that would have overwhelmed me back then make sense now. Doors that stayed shut were not punishment — they were redirection. The waiting didn’t pause my life; it prepared it.

That call reminded me that growth doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like endurance. Sometimes it looks like staying faithful when clarity hasn’t arrived. Sometimes it looks like becoming — slowly, quietly, deeply.

Sitting in class, I carried his words with me. Not as pressure, but as reassurance and a reason to achieve. A reminder that I was never behind. Never forgotten.

I was being formed.

And maybe that’s what waiting really is — not absence, but becoming.

I’ll leave you with the words of my mother, “It is morning when you wake up and not when another does”