“Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning, and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them.”
Luke 12.35-37
Perhaps like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, you find yourself in a place of waiting, too: waiting in this season of Lent, when we look towards the hope of Easter and the salvation we anticipate in the Resurrection. Or maybe yours feels like a different kind of waiting…waiting for good news, for a diagnosis, for a child to return home, for a relationship to be mended, for what’s “next,” for long-awaited answers to hard questions, for a miracle.
As Christ-followers we can logically understand that we’re called to wait, but the practice of waiting stretches us or sometimes even pushes us right up to what feels like the end of ourselves. No matter how difficult waiting on hope or a breakthrough might seem, we can put our energy into preparing our hearts and minds as we seek Christ’s peace and wait on His promises. We do this through prayer, time in the Word, and time in fellowship with the Body.
This Lent and moving forward, what does it look like to be awake when the master comes? How do we stay dressed for action and keep our lamps burning in the day to day of life and work and community? Is there one step you can take this week—in prayer or relationship, to surrender the anxiety or stress of waiting and to trust that Jesus will meet you in your need?
A Practice: Keep a jar over Lent and to add to it any worries or anxieties that arise. The exercise of putting a “care” in the jar would represent giving our requests to God and then committing to praying over them but not worrying over them. As a way of “not looking back,” once it’s in the jar, the encouragement is to pray and trust that God sees it and will cover it. An act of surrender and learning to trust him more.
Guiding Verse: Luke 12.22-25. “And he said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food and the body is more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?”
