That's good enough for her and she's off dreaming about cake in heaven.
It's been a month of birthdays and feasts so our table's regularly seen cake. Her grandparents spend the evening here and she tells Grandma that we're going to have cake in heaven.
Grandma looks to me with eyebrows raised and I figure I better have a reasonable explanation for my approval. Well, when we get to heaven, I say, there's going to be a wedding feast and we'll be invited, actually, Christ's people are the bride. And whoever heard of a wedding feast without cake?
(Okay, Brian and I didn't have cake at our wedding but then that takes it out of the classification of feast....does cheesecake count?)!!!
This three year-old daughter waits in hope for the promise of cake in heaven and I'm glad.
(I figure if I'm wrong it's no problem since the feast could only be better than we imagine, and if there's no cake then there'll be something we could not even ask for or dream of!)
We enter this season of advent...a gift of waiting for a promise. Only as much as I understand do I appreciate the waiting...
Mary stayed with Elizabeth for about three months and then returned home.
Two women. Both ends of the age spectrum represented. Each encountered God radically. Hadn't the LORD's people been waiting for three hundred years for Him to speak?
He changed their lives, their hearts. This One God. Once again speaking, making promises...promises that gestated inside these women till their time came...
And His promises were fulfilled. Both had miraculous pregnancies ending in the gender predicted. They responded in obedience in giving these boys their preordained names. John. Jesus.
They truly came. The forerunner and the awaited Messiah. Emmanuel, God With Us.
I enter this advent desiring to wait with them. To feel what it must have been like to anticipate what God was doing in them. Through them. With them. For them. For all humankind.
Elizabeth and Mary offer a pregnant picture...the counting of days until painful arrival. The wonder and beauty and agony and discomfort all tied together. Waiting in hope for the fulfillment of a promise.
And what is waiting worth unless we wait in hope?
I know their promises were fulfilled because the end of their story's been told.
But in re-waiting I renew anticipation of my own waits. And of His second coming. For He's promised to come again.
Since He fulfilled it the first time, I can wait in hope that He will fulfill it again.
"Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One? "I am," said Jesus. "And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."
My daughter waits in hope for future promises to the degree she's able at her age. Do I?
Text: Luke 1.56, Mark 14.61,62, NIV, pictures of cakes enjoyed in November
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