It’s enough to send paranoid, anxious souls scrambling for their nerve pills …
“A killer tornado could devastate Dallas, a category five hurricane could wipe out New York City, an earthquake could flatten L.A., a tsunami could wash the Pacific Northwest into the sea. It hasn’t happened yet, but it COULD happen TOMORROW,” warns the gloomy television announcer.
It’s a promotional clip for a series on The Weather Channel and I’ve been hearing it almost every morning when I tune in for my “Local on the 8s” forecast.
It COULD happen tomorrow. Well, sure it could. And so could a lot of other awful things …
A meteor could land on my house; I could be abducted by aliens again (just kidding about the “again” part – I wanted to see if you were paying attention). No doubt about it — this world can be a scary place.
The Bible certainly doesn’t sugarcoat the grim realities of life on a fallen planet …
Ask the folks of Sodom and Gomorrah what could happen tomorrow … oops, you can’t — they were fried by fire and brimstone.
Or how about Job, the Bill Gates of his era? One day he was enjoying a life of luxury; the next, he lost nearly everything but his whiny wife and finger-pointing friends.
Or Joseph … One day he was strutting around in the beautiful robe his Daddy had given him; the next, his jealous brothers threw him into a pit and sold him to Egyptian slave traders.
Sudden disasters do happen. But you know what? The Bible also records a whole lot of GOOD things that happened just as suddenly …
Moses had been hiding in the wilderness for 40 years, assuming he would spend the rest of his once-glamorous life dodging scorpions and tending sheep. Then, SUDDENLY, God spoke from a burning bush to the fugitive shepherd and the life of Moses turned into an epic adventure.
As the youngest kid in his family, David got the dirty job of watching the sheep. One day he was SUDDENLY called in from the fields and before he could shake the wool off his robe, the lad was anointed king. Quite a promotion.
Mary was a young peasant girl living in an obscure village, probably planning an obscure life with her obscure fiancé … until the angel Gabriel SUDDENLY popped in one day and announced that she would give birth to the Son of God. Nothing obscure about that.
The man had been crippled for 38 years and there he was again, lying beside the pool of Bethesda, knowing he would be healed if he could just get in the pool first when the angel stirred the waters. How many times had he tried, failed and endured another day of frustrated misery? But SUDDENLY Jesus walked up and instantly gave the man the thing he’d been dreaming of for nearly four decades – health and wholeness.
None of these folks anticipated the wondrous things that happened to them. One day life was normal; the next day, everything changed.
And so it is with us. It COULD happen tomorrow. Your sickness could be healed; you could get that job you’ve been praying for; your prodigal son could return home.
God calls Himself “the God of all hope” (Romans 15:13) for a reason. Nothing is impossible with Him. Maybe it hasn’t happened yet, but it could happen tomorrow. And that makes tomorrow worth waking up for.