Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.
John 14:19 (NIV)
The Promise Peter Heard First
Because I live, you also will live.
Peter heard that in the room where he had just offered to lay down his life and been told he would disown his friend three times before the rooster crowed. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me, Jesus told the same men, and Peter was one of them.
He went out that night and stood at a fire in the high priest’s courtyard, warming himself with the servants and the officials. A girl at the door asked him, and then the men around the fire, and then a relative of the man whose ear he had cut off. He said no three times, and a rooster crowed. Later he stood up in front of a crowd and said in front of a crowd what he had denied in the courtyard.
Jesus said that promise to men who were going to fail him before morning, and he did not take it back afterward.
She’s been practicing the whole way in, talking to the windshield at the lights, changing a word and starting over, and the wipers have been going since the county line. The man she’s driving in to see has worked for her since before her kids could read. There is no version of this morning where she does it well, and she has known that since the on-ramp.
She’s afraid of doing it badly, and she’s going to. The promise she has in her head was said over a man who did worse that same night and was not written out of anything that came after.
She goes in through the front, past the desk, so that he hears it from her first.
A Prayer to Remember
God, we’re afraid of the next hour, and we’ve been afraid of it since before we got in the car. We want to come out of that room looking like we were fair to him. You’ve known that about us a long while, and you said what you said over men who were about to do worse than we will.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
