Here’s a never-did-happen scenario for you to picture: a young married couple is leaving for a 10-day cruise and leaving their 5-year-old at home alone, with keys to the car and a credit card to use for any purchases. (Disregard, for now, your rising outrage at such irresponsibility and the urge to reach out immediately to the police and Child Protective Services, OK?) The parents have left and the little one looks at the car keys and realizes they are useless since driving a vehicle is impossible. Just getting it started and getting it out of the garage are already two of those impossible things. Then, looking at the credit card lying on the kitchen counter, it hits that the vacationers, in their excitement, forgot to leave a cell phone! The situation quickly reaches toward panic level as its enormity sinks in. This subsides with the raiding of Mom’s secret candy stash. Then, on to the ice cream in the freezer. Ah! Now for some cartoons . . . Yes, I know my imagination carries me away – sometimes.
As ridiculous as the above story may be, I wonder if it corresponds at all to the feelings of the disciples after Jesus rose into the cloud to return to his Father? Is this what they were pondering when they were interrupted by the angels? Did they want to cry out that they weren’t ready to do the job all by themselves? Were they desperately hoping Jesus would come right back down? Were any of them wishing they’d paid closer attention to all he’d told them? As they left the spot of Jesus’ disappearing, and began the descent back into the city, did any of them want to simply run away?
Well, they had ten more days of waiting before they received the promised power. That must have been a tense ten days – serving as a good prototype for our own times of waiting today. It’s so easy to read Biblical accounts like this one and accept them as great tales, big adventures. We know how they turned out, like the endings of favorite movies or books. But their waiting required a deep dive into their faith reserves as they were facing potential life-and-death consequences to whatever they agreed to do next.
The wait, as we well know, was completed with the Pentecost arrival of the Holy Spirit. Words can’t adequately describe it except to say it was so much more than just a happening. Pentecost was far from the conclusion of anything. It was a raw, glorious, undiluted, adrenaline-fired event, sure, but it also hurled them out into vast unknowns, where every minute of every day (for years!) humbled them into fresh Spirit-dependence. Is that the Holy Spirit invitation to me, to us, even today, these two thousand years later? Does he have more heart-pumpingly glorious events waiting with our name on them? Would that be cool if he did? Would we say yes?? PD
Don graduated from Regent University in 1988 and moved to France for seven years, coming back to the US briefly to marry Sue in 1990. The work in France included working in a Christian School and helping plant a church before returning in 1995. He’s been pastor of Peninsula Vineyard since 1999. He enjoys counseling, especially married couples, traveling back to France (with Sue), reading, doing Sudoku puzzles and sleuthing out good, dark chocolate. Don serves as the senior pastor of the Vineyard Church Peninsula, in Newport News, Virginia.