Come, Lord Jesus

Someone stands at a window as the light goes gold and then grey, watching the road. They are waiting for a traveler they love, one who has been long away and is finally coming home. They do not know the hour, only that it is coming, and so the waiting itself has a particular charge to it. It is not the bracing dread of bad news. It is the lean-forward ache of expectancy, eyes going again and again to the bend in the road where the figure will first appear. Scripture's second-to-last word is a promise and a prayer locked together like that, like a returning traveler and the one at the window. Christ says, yes, I am coming quickly. And the church, across two thousand years of windows and roads, answers back: Amen, come, Lord Jesus. It is the oldest prayer the people of God have, older than most of the words we use to say it. And it is exactly the right posture for the end of this whole journey. Not the anxious bracing you may have done so much of, the waiting that expects the next blow. This is waiting transformed. He who is coming, Hebrews says, will come, and will not delay. The figure is already on the road. The only question is which bend.

You have done a great deal of waiting on this journey, and a lot of it was the anxious kind, the bracing that flinches toward the next loss, the watching that expects bad news. Here, at the end, waiting is handed back to you transformed. Christ says, yes, I am coming quickly, and you are given the church's oldest prayer to say in return: come, Lord Jesus. Feel the difference between those two kinds of waiting. One is a person crouched against a blow. The other is a person at a window, leaning toward a homecoming. The same hours, the same not-knowing of the hour, but everything about the posture is changed, because of who is on the road. Whatever you are still waiting through, the unanswered prayer, the unhealed place, the future you cannot yet see, you are not waiting for the next catastrophe. You are waiting toward a Person who has promised He is on His way and will not delay. So let your waiting lean forward again. Let it become expectant. The One you are watching for is surely coming, and He is closer to the bend than He was when you started.