You’re Not Just Waiting

I want to talk to the person who is tired.

Not sleepy tired. Soul tired. The kind of tired that comes from holding on for so long that you’ve forgotten what you were even holding on for. The kind that creeps in when the news is heavy, the bills are heavier, and hope starts to feel like a luxury you can’t afford right now.

If that’s you, stay with me for a minute.

There’s a story in the Bible about a man named Jairus. He had a sick daughter — a little girl, twelve years old and dying at home. He fought his way through a crowd to get to Jesus, fell at his feet, and begged him to come. And Jesus said yes. They were on their way.

But then Jesus stopped.

Someone else needed him. And while Jesus was attending to that someone else, a messenger arrived with the worst possible news: Your daughter is dead. Don’t bother the teacher anymore.

I want to sit in that moment with you, because I think a lot of us are living there right now. We came to God with something urgent. We believed. We waited. And somewhere in the waiting, things got worse instead of better. The diagnosis came back bad. The account hit zero. The relationship fell apart. The world outside got louder and meaner and harder to make sense of.

And somebody — maybe your own fear, maybe exhaustion, maybe just the weight of it all — is whispering the same thing that messenger said to Jairus: Don’t bother. It’s too late. Give up.

But here’s what I keep coming back to.

Jairus didn’t go home. He stayed with Jesus.

And I used to read that as an act of heroic faith, like Jairus had some extraordinary willpower the rest of us are missing. But I don’t think that’s it. I think Jairus stayed because of who he was standing next to.

There’s a moment in the story that’s easy to skip over. Jesus doesn’t send Jairus ahead to the house. He walks with him. All the way there, through the grief and the uncertainty and the not knowing how this ends, Jesus is right beside him.

I think about what it means to wait with someone versus waiting alone. There’s a difference between sitting at a gate watching the “DELAYED” sign blink and sitting at that same gate with the pilot right next to you. Nothing has changed — the flight is still delayed, you still don’t know when you’re leaving — but something shifts when you realize the person who controls the journey is already with you in the wait.

That’s the thing about Jairus I don’t want you to miss.

He wasn’t just waiting for Jesus to do something. He was waiting with Jesus.

I know the world feels unsteady right now. I know it’s hard to trust a plan you can’t see, especially when what you can see is frightening. I know hope gets harder to hold when you’ve been holding it for a long time.

Jairus didn’t know how the story would end. He only knew who he was walking with.

Maybe that’s enough for today.

You don’t have to know how this turns out. You don’t have to have a timeline. You don’t have to feel strong. The invitation isn’t to figure everything out. It’s simply to remember who is beside you while you wait.

You’re not just waiting.

You’re waiting with the pilot.