encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.
1 Thessalonians 2:12 (NIV)
A Father With His Children
A dog waits at the front door in the late afternoon, at the hour the other car used to pull into the driveway. He has done it every day since the end of January. The woman who kept him runs water at the sink and lets him wait it out, since there is no way to explain a divorce to a dog. After a while he comes away on his own.
The men who brought this message into Thessalonica worked night and day, so that no one there could say they had come to be fed. They stayed in that town and they kept at the people in it. Encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.
Paul says he dealt with each of them as a father deals with his own children. A father does that one child at a time, over years, in the same rooms, on the evenings when nothing is happening.
God calls them into his kingdom and glory, and Paul urges the worthy life on people God has already called. He is writing to children who are in the family and not yet much good at it.
Encouraging, comforting and urging take evenings. You come to believe someone at an hour, by what keeps happening at it, and you stop believing them the same way. The dog learned his hour like that. He is unlearning it now, one empty afternoon after another.
I want everything to take one afternoon. It has never once worked out that way for me.
This afternoon she gets down on the floor beside him instead of running water at the sink. She can’t explain it to him from down there either, and she stays until he comes away.
A Prayer to Remember
Lord, there’s one person I keep answering with advice, because advice is faster and it lets me leave. I’ve done it twice this week. Today I can be where they are for an hour without solving anything for them. Show me which hour.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
