Day 76 – Spoiler Alert
John 11:1-2
Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.)
I’d like to start off by confessing that I have a terrible habit of reading the synopsis of a film before I watch it. I love, and actively look for, spoilers. This controversial film-watching strategy is wrong for lots of reasons (sorry), but a big one is that when you know the end, the bits in the middle – like the details, the emotion, the highs and the lows – just don’t matter as much.
I think we can do that so often with Bible stories; you may have done it with today’s passage. (Spoiler alert: it ends with resurrection). We know how it’s going to end, and that means we miss the details, the emotions and the highs and lows.
We can so easily forget that the Bible is full of stories of people living their lives in real time, day by day. We can read the Bible as a series of tales with happy endings, and crucially endings that seem to come around quickly.
Over the next few days we’ll be looking at John 11. If we pretend we don’t know the end of the story it’s the story of two sisters in pain, with no idea as to how their story is going to end. They can’t skip ahead a few verses to get to the miracle. They have to live it out; they have to live in the pain, live in the waiting, live in the unknown.
For so many of us in these crazy, uncertain times there may well be miracles ahead, but right now like Mary and Martha we find ourselves in the waiting bit, living day by day, and we can’t skip ahead to the end of the chapter.
But just like Mary and Martha we get to do it all with Jesus as our friend. We navigate the uncertainty, the waiting, the highs and the lows with Jesus.
Today be encouraged that Jesus is with us through it all. We’re living in real time, we’re living in waiting but we’re in good company.
Prayer — Lord, thank you that you’re with me through it all and that your Word is so full of stories of hope. Help me to find strength and hope in you as I wait.
Martha Goshawk
Gas Street Team