When God doesn’t respond apparently to us right away or “soon,” we have a tendency to think He’s dawdling, or He didn’t hear, or He’s ignoring us, or that He’s saying no. We ask Him to help us or He tells us something is going to happen, and then it doesn’t happen when we think it will. Most of the time it doesn’t even happen how we think it will.
But in the Bible we often find God fulfilling His promises and responding to prayer much later than people expected. Abraham and Sarah were already old when God promised them a son, and they waited years more after that before their son arrived. God promised a Messiah, and thousands of years later the Messiah came as a baby and took about thirty more years to really kick off the rest of what we know from the Gospels. When Lazarus was dying, Jesus waited so that he arrived four days after the man had been dead before actively doing anything about it. When Jesus died He waited until the third day to rise. Jesus has promised to come back one day, and it’s been thousands of years.
God is never late. It is actually impossible for God to be late. God stands outside of time. He created time. He knows when the best time to do everything is. So just because God isn’t on your schedule doesn’t mean He’s late. God cannot and will not ever be late. God always moves and arrives exactly on time.