I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.
John 14:18 (NIV)
The Word He Chose Was Orphans
You can hear her from the vending machines. It’s a big laugh and she doesn’t bring it down much for a surgical waiting room, where everyone else has settled into the low murmur people save for hospitals. Her brother went back at seven. Between updates she reads things off her phone to the man in the next chair, and nobody has asked either of them to keep it down.
The men listening were being told he was going away. He said he would ask the Father for another advocate, the Spirit of truth, who was already with them and would be in them. Then this: “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” Orphans was the word he chose for what they were about to be.
One of them, the other Judas, the one who was not Iscariot, broke in to ask why he intended to show himself to them and not to the world. They had just heard that the world would stop seeing him while they would go on seeing him, and that because he lives, they also would live. The question they came back with was about the world.
The promise was made to those men about one particular absence, and it travels to a reader now along the road he laid out in the same conversation. He goes. The Spirit comes and stays. Because he lives, they live, and that line runs out from them to whoever is reading it. He promises his own coming. He doesn’t promise anybody else will stay.
The woman by the vending machines is telling the man in the next chair about a dog that ate a phone charger. He puts his coffee down to listen.
A Prayer to Remember
You kept your word to the men who heard you say it, and the Spirit you sent has not gone home since. Thank you for that. Come the way you said you would into a day when I cannot see you at all, and stay past the point where I quit looking. Thank you for staying with people who are not watching.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
