Looking for the Fig Tree

Read your morning newspaper, watch the television, check out your Facebook newsfeed, or just look out your own window on some days.  We see flooding, drought, fire, earthquakes, diseases — all of them seem worse today then they did just a few years ago!  And that’s just the natural phenomenon.  In our own personal lives, we are finding it harder and harder just to move around with some sense of safety or with the simple trust and confidence that everything is going to be ok.

A Day of Fulfillment

The Bible has taught us about these things for thousands of years.  The prophet Amos spoke of the day of the Lord as a dark day, not light.  He said it would be like escaping from a lion only to be met by a bear (Amos 5:19)!  Or, like entering your house tired after a long day, resting your hand on the wall and being bit by a snake!  Those are hardly reassuring visions of the day of the Lord but as Christians, we see that day as a day of fulfillment because we see all of these things through the eyes of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ!

Signs of the end, for us, are received as signs of God’s beginning!  Wherever death and destruction are certain, in Christ new life continues to show up each and every day.

New Life Springs Forth

Consider the fig tree.  Yes it loses its leaves in the winter and that is sad but each of us knows that come spring new life will spring from its buds.  This is how we are to look at and experience the hard parts of life.  Even when life deals us it’s worst we have the upper hand because we know the end of the story… we have a brother named Jesus who is walking three days ahead of each of us through death and has offered back to us the promise of everlasting life.

In Advent, we are given a gift.  The gift is space and time to consider more deeply what it means to be a people of the already, but not yet.  Look around your lives in these weeks and look at what God is up to.  What is passing away?  What is sprouting forth in a new life?  For both of these realities let us turn to God this day and say, “Thank you.”