The Darkness is Fleeing, and Morning Is Coming

When a sleepless night drags on, the growing light and break of dawn are a relief.  Though we are walking zombies for the day, at least the darkness is not plaguing us and we can try going about business as usual...

When that 'darkness' weighs down our lives -- in suffering, in delay, need, and all matter of life challenges -- we cry out to God for relief. 

And wait.  And wait. 

Life seems to come to a standstill while awaiting the light of answers to our pleas for help, recovery, or reconciliation.

We are forced to seek Him still.  Like Job, we come to understand who He is and trust Him more; like Abraham and Sarah, champions of faith, who waited many years for the birth of Isaac; and like many a saint over the centuries, we take up that dreaded legacy of delay in prayers.  That discrepancy is what our faith and our lives scream out against:

But God is not idle. When you consider even the timing, it becomes more 'visible' that the missing elements are often not yet in place.

Christ's birth is one of those 'delays' in history.  Between the Old and New Testaments is 400 years during which God was silent.  Many things had to come to fruition before the Chosen One could walk this earth and bring the promise that grace fulfilled.  Just think of the answered prophecies, the timing of history with Roman dominion over Israel, the Greek language as lingua franca, and all the rest, which brought the gospel out from an obscure backwater to the center of the pagan Roman world and beyond.

Meanwhile, generations languished. Jewish revolts rose and fell. Those longing for the promised Messiah were called upon to wait.

One of the most moving pictures of waiting is the two elderly witnesses of Jesus at his circumcision. Simeon, who had waited for the coming of the Messiah, said simply:  

Anna, who was also serving God in the temple, spoke of the child to all who would listen as well.

They, in their waiting, received the privilege of being the first to know who Jesus was. Their joy is tangible in the pages of Luke.

When we feel our answers to real troubling needs are beyond the far, rocky horizon of reality, lift your eyes!  For the day will come! 

Trust in it.  The saints of God are privileged to see HIM at work. That ray of light will one day signal its approach.