Once the Christmas season rolls around, the popular "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" song can be heard everywhere. The song hit a milestone in 2023 when it rose to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the USA for the first time—sixty-five years after its release.
Singer Brenda Lee was just thirteen years old when she recorded the song in 1958. She was seventy-eight years old when she got to celebrate the song’s latest success. It broke many records including the longest wait from a song’s release to its reaching number one on the music industry’s prestigious list.
This song’s accomplishment reminds us that many breakthroughs are years in the making. We like instant results for our hard work. But God works according to His own calendar. We may not understand God’s timing or why we have to wait so long, but in the book of Ecclesiastes King Solomon reminds us that God’s timing is perfect. “For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven” (3:1). As we follow God’s lead instead of being in a hurry to reach the next milestone in our personal or professional life, we can agree with Solomon that “God has made everything beautiful for its own time” (v. 11).
Even the first Christmas culminated a time of waiting many centuries for the Christ child. Whether we have to wait weeks, months, or years to experience breakthroughs, let’s not grow weary as we wait. We can trust God and the gift of His beautiful timing.
