Christ is Never Late. Nor Is He Early. He Arrives Precisely When He Means To

In the cases of both Jairus and Mary and Martha, they prayed and sought for Jesus to miraculously heal their loved ones. In both cases, Jairus’s daughter and Lazarus were on the brink of death when Jesus was called. They did everything they could to make sure that divine healing came before it was too late. But, from the perspective of Jairus and Mary and Martha, Christ did come too late. They had prayed and exercised faith and actively sought out divine intervention and their prayers went unanswered. Their loved ones died anyway. But death is not the end of the story. Christ may not have given Jairus and Mary and Martha the miraculous healing they were praying for, but it does not mean that He did not feel their pain and have mercy and compassion on them, nor does it mean that He did not have a miracle prepared for them, a miracle for more glorious than anything they could have dared hope or even imagined. Like the wizard Gandalf, Christ is never late. Nor is He early. He arrives precisely when He means to. From our mortal framework, it may often seem that God waited past the point of no return to answer our prayers and now it is no longer possible and the thing we were praying for is gone forever. But that’s just not true. Abraham and Sarah, with good reason, may have thought that having a child was well and truly behind them, that God was too late to answer that particular prayer. But with God, nothing is impossible. God does not forget about us. We may be in the fourth watch and our boat may be almost sinking from the fury of the storm, and we may cry out, ‘Carest thou not that we perish?’ God does care. He is waiting for the exact right moment to bless us with the exact right miracle, a miracle far better than anything we had in mind.