When You Least Expect It!

     I have never anticipated an event more than I did when I was 8½ months pregnant. Every day I anticipated the arrival of a new life. I prepared for it! It was a constant trial of endurance. I was miserable in my swollen, aching, big bellied body. The time seemed to drag by. My first child was due on February 8th. When February 7th came to an end, I figured it would be a few more days because I knew that only 5% of babies were born on their due date. I could just relax the next day because the odds were way against me going into labor. I really needed to wash my hair that night, but I told myself to go on to bed because I could wash it the next day. After all, I wasn’t going to have anything to do since I wouldn’t be having a baby! Well, I was wrong! When I least expected it, at 4:00 a.m., I began my first labor experience. That evening, I gave birth to my son; on his due date. The time of anticipation had come to an end.
     Though we might anticipate it, we will be raptured out of this miserable world when we least expect it! I got a glimpse of how quickly the unexpected can occur last week when all of a sudden the shelves in the garage fell. (See Monday’s and Wednesday’s devotion) It was a Friday night like any other Friday night. The shelves had hung with the containers on them for four years. Countless times the garage door went up and down, and the entrance door opened and closed, and the car doors slammed; and yet they had never given way. The shelves did not fall because of an accident or any kind of action taken against them. I walked to my car and closed my car door like I have daily. Nothing was out of the ordinary. There was no expectancy of anything major happening! Then out of nowhere, I heard a loud sound and in a split second the unexpected occurred!
     As Christians, we anticipate the day the trumpet will sound and we will be leaving this world. It will happen in an instant: an instant when we least expect it. It will be amazing! We will be here one second and flying home the next!
     Here is the problem though; we say we anticipate it but we really are not living in a true state of anticipation. When was the last time you were excited about the thought, “Today could be the day I see Jesus?” When we do not live in that kind of anticipation, we do not stay ready to face the Lord and we grow complacent. We procrastinate doing the things we know we need to do. I do understand that when you are a young adult, it is hard to think about leaving this world without doing the things you have always dreamed of; like having children and getting married. However, that is when we have to trust that our eternal life, in the presence of God, will be far more than our minds can fathom and with this in mind, all of our worldly simply fade away.
     Sincerely take a few minutes today and imagine what it would be like to stand before the Lord in the next few hours? Are you ready? Do you have regrets? What have you been procrastinating? Do you anticipate the second coming of Jesus like a child anticipates being a mama when she plays with her doll? Or do you anticipate the second coming of Jesus like a nine month pregnant woman? Jesus will come and it will happen in a split second, with a blow of a trumpet! Listen! What do you hear?

You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes—it’s over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we’ll all be changed. In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelves and replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal.

1 Corinthians 15:52-53