“Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:11)
I once heard a story of a son and his father that should inspire believers who are waiting on the Kingdom of God with a patient and an enduring faith.
Long before the advent of modern communication gadgets, like the telephone or email, this little boy who was a student in a faraway village would wait patiently at an arranged bus stop, at a given time and date, to collect his monthly stipend which his father would send through a courier who never failed to show up, and this went on for years.
He had no means of knowing whether the courier would arrive on time or that he may not even come at all, all he had was his childlike faith, and his father through the courier never failed to deliver.
Like everything that rests on faith, on a fateful day, his trust in his father’s promise would be tested.
How? For some reason, the courier had failed to show up in his father’s village which therefore hindered his father from sending the monthly stipend- his son’s life saver.
What did his father do? Did he postpone the delivery since the courier refused to show up? No. He trusted his son’s obedience to wait, and he desperately sought for another courier late in the evening to go on the usual errand, worried that his son would be waiting.
What did the son do? Did he walk away once the courier failed to show up at the appointed time? His was a dilemma because he had been given strict instructions by his father on where to wait and the timing hadn’t failed till the fateful day.
The little son became worried as dusk fell, huddled up in the sidewalk he waited, confident in his father’s promise: all he had was his faith in his father’s promise.
Suddenly an unfamiliar commercial bus appeared from the distant horizon and the little boy’s worried countenance brightened as the bus slowed down and stopped where he stood.
Pleasantries exchanged and identity verified the driver delivered the little boy’s life saving stipend and off he went back to school skipping away with joy as dusk fell.
His father delivered and his faith in his father was as strong as ever.
Someone aptly captured this scenario in her definition of hope saying, ‘Hope is a favorable and confident expectation; it’s an expectant attitude that something good is going to happen and things will work out, no matter what situation we’re facing’.
Why do we need to strengthen our hope in the second coming of the Messiah more than ever? Because time is nothing with God and his estimation of time differs from human estimation.
There was a huge generational gap (lasting 400 years) between the time the Old Testament prophecy about the coming of the Messiah (Isaiah 11:1-5) and the unveiling of the Messiah in the New Testament (Luke 3:15).
We need to also strengthen our waiting on the coming of the Messiah as promised because Jesus himself had hinted that the more crisis we see in our world the nearer would be his coming.
Now no one can deny that the world we live in is in a big crisis ranging from the pandemic to economic crisis and wars and Jesus had cited these ever-growing incidents as signals of his second come.
Most importantly, he encouraged us to be the more vigilant, not getting swamped with the dangers but to become more intent and careful in our walk with God as we wait for the promise of His second coming.
How do we wait for the Messiah? Like the little boy in our story, we must be rooted firmly in the word of God. No child of God can endure the waiting period without a daily nourishing of this Word of Hope.
Today is another opportunity to decide to align every area of our lives with the word of God with a patient attitude while shunning worldliness and every evil distraction.
The dusk is settling in on us all and it’s the best time of our lives to re-focus our priorities on His Word and not on the World.
Reading
Mathew 24: 1-14; 29-32.
