When I Am Waiting for the Light

Devotional

There's a difference between a hard night and a long one.

A hard night you can brace for. A long one starts asking you questions. Whether you were forgotten. Whether the promise you were holding was actually meant for somebody else. Whether the light you were told was coming got delayed, or was never sent.

You know what that looks like in your life. The scan that keeps saying the same thing. The prayer that's been going up since 2019. The kid who still isn't calling back. It's waiting with no date attached, and it does something to a person. It tempts you to go make your own light. To settle for a smaller comfort because the real one is taking too long.

Luke gives us a song from exactly that spot, and the man singing it had been waiting his whole life.

Zechariah was an old priest. His wife had been barren for decades, which in that culture wasn't just grief, it was public shame. An angel finally shows up with the promise of a son, and Zechariah says essentially, how would I know that's true. So God shuts his mouth for nine months.

Then the baby's born. His tongue comes loose. And what comes out isn't "I'm so relieved."

"Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people."

Watch where his eyes go. Not at his own situation. Up and out. And that word "visited" is doing serious work. It's the word for a king arriving in a forgotten province. A doctor coming to the bedside. A father walking back through the door of a house full of kids who thought they were orphans. God doesn't send word from a distance. He comes.

And then Zechariah says why he can trust it. "As he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old... to remember his holy covenant." God's rescue wasn't improvised that year. It was promised centuries before Zechariah was born.

Which reframes your question in the dark. The question isn't really whether God remembers you. It's whether God remembers what he said. And every page of the book answers the same way.

Then Zechariah turns and looks at his eight-day-old son and sees past him to somebody else. "The sunrise shall visit us from on high, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death."

The sunrise shall visit us.

Not "the sunrise will eventually occur if you hold on." Visit. Same word again. It's coming toward you, on purpose, personally.

And think about how a sunrise actually works. It doesn't ask if you're ready. It doesn't check whether you slept. It doesn't negotiate with the dark. It just comes, and the dark has no vote. That's the mercy Zechariah is describing. Gentle enough not to burn you. Certain enough that nothing stops it.

And it has a name.

Jesus doesn't stand outside the darkness holding a lantern and calling for you to find your way out to him. He comes in. He sits down where you're sitting. And then, Zechariah says, he guides your feet into the way of peace. Not around the suffering. Through it, on foot, with you.

Look at Mary too. She's got no birth plan, no reputation left, no evidence any of this ends well. And she sings: "My soul magnifies the Lord." What did she have? A word from God, and one sentence from an angel: "Nothing will be impossible with God."

So you don't have to manufacture hope this morning. You don't have to talk yourself into feeling better about the night. Just look at what he's already done and let that set your expectations for what he'll do.

He has visited. He has redeemed. He has remembered.

If you're sitting in the dark today, understand where you are. You're sitting exactly where the light is aimed.

The sunrise isn't asking permission. It's just coming.