The Messenger Is Coming and the Sun Will Rise With Healing

Do you know what it feels like to wait? Not just waiting for supper, but the long kind of waiting, where you sit by the window and watch the road, and no one comes.

That is how God's people felt, long ago.

For so many years, God had spoken: through Moses, through David's songs, through the prophets who stood up tall and said, "This is what the Lord says." His voice was like a fire, and like a river, and like a father calling his children home.

Then the last prophet spoke his last words, and those last words were a promise.

"Look," God said. "I am sending my messenger ahead. He will get the road ready. And the One you have been longing for, the One your heart has been aching for, he is coming. He is really coming."

And then God said something so beautiful I want you to hold it gently, like a small warm bird in your hands.

"For you who love my name," he said, "the sun is going to rise. And it will rise with healing, the way morning light spills soft and golden over a whole tired world. And you will come out into it, and you will leap. The way little calves leap when the gate swings open and they run into the green field, glad, glad, so glad to be free."

That was the promise.

And after it, no more words came. The pages went still. No prophet stood up, no fire fell, no voice called from heaven. One year of silence went by, then ten, then a hundred, then four hundred.

Four hundred years.

That is longer than your grandma, and her grandma, and her grandma before her. Babies were born and grew old, and the whole time, the people waited. Mothers rocked their babies and whispered, "Maybe in your lifetime. Maybe the sun will rise for you."

Sometimes it felt like God had forgotten them. But God's silence did not mean he had stopped loving. He was like a whole house holding its breath in the last dark minute before a wonderful surprise. He was not far away, drumming his fingers. He was leaning close, getting everything ready, all through those long silent years, for the morning of all mornings.

Then, one ordinary night, in a little town, in a borrowed stable, a baby cried.

A small, thin, brand-new cry, breaking four hundred years of silence.

That was the sound the whole world had been waiting for. The messenger would come to ready the road. The One they had longed for was here at last.

The Sun had risen.

He came with healing, just the way the promise said, soft and golden as the wings of the dawn. He was the gentle King Zechariah had seen, the One who would ride into the city one day on a borrowed donkey to speak peace to the world. The long waiting was over.

And morning is not a moment. Morning keeps coming. The light that began in that stable is still spilling out over the world, and one day you will run into it and leap, like a calf when the gate swings open at last.