This article is the final chapter of Sister Michelle Watson’s series “Dealing With Divine Delays.”

In 2017, I focused the majority of my articles on the topic of divine delays, and I shared with you how the Lord carried my husband and me through a period of infertility when we wanted a baby but couldn’t have one.

I told you about

• how I felt betrayed by God
• that I tried to “deserve” a baby
• wondering why God would let this happen to us
• the struggle between wanting to do something to help our situation versus waiting on God to act for us
• feeling like God was very far away when we needed Him most
• figuring out how to let God fight the battle

Now, it’s time to bring everything full circle and close this series of articles. When we left off, my husband and I had received a message from God through the Word of the Lord, saying that if we’d trust and believe then God would provide our heart’s desire.

After this, I thought it couldn’t be long now. Days … a month? (Remember, this series is called divine delays.) This experience happened in September of 2013, and it wasn’t until November of 2014 that we discovered God had answered our prayer for a child.

What happened during those 14 months? Basically what my husband often calls a “crescendo of prayer.” It was a gradual increase in the intensity of prayer surrounding this need.

We continued to fast and pray together regularly. And I got anointed a lot. I’ve written before about how I was self-conscious about getting anointed a bunch of times. But God made it clear to me through several experiences that He wanted me to do it, and I finally figured that if I was willing to go to the doctor’s office over and over again, why would I hesitate going to that chair by the pulpit over and over again?

I can actually remember many of the specific words that were said during many of those anointings. I think God didn’t let me forget so that I’d know He was in it all, encouraging me to keep it up.

At God’s appointed moment, we realized He’d done something great for us. It’s difficult to describe what we felt knowing that a baby was, at long last, on the way. We knelt together as a couple in an astonished prayer of thanks. We have precious memories of telling our parents the news and hearing their exclamations of surprise and joy, of making phone calls to the many people who had prayed and supported us along the way (from them, we got wild cheers, actual screams, hearty woo-hoos, and the silence of falling tears). Those happy memories have sunk deep into our souls. Add pixie dust to those memories, and you’ll fly right off the ground.

God put “joy where the pain had been.”

If you find yourself in the middle of a divine delay, my prayer for you is that you reach out to God with both arms, recognizing your humble place before Him, without fear of failure, trusting that all your spiritual efforts will make a bigger difference than anything else you could possibly do. The process may be slow — delayed — but it’s also, in the end, divine.

It may seem impossible, but this divine delay could turn out to be one of the biggest blessings in your life.

This article has undergone ministry review and approval.