is He coming soon? maybe yes and no.

Today Jesus talks about being ready for His coming in the reading from the One Year Bible. You can listen to the OT reading HERE and the NT reading HERE.

Jesus tells us that we should live our lives constantly ready for His return, and not say to ourselves "It's going to be awhile before He comes back" and start doing foolish things. We don't know the hour of His return, and so we should live in constant expectation.

And there are two things about this. One is that living in that state of expectation makes us better people. We become the saints that we need to be to live in heaven. We become perfected by this constant expectation. Now, notice I say we BECOME perfected. None of us ever quite gets there in this lifetime, though some people like Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, and John Paul II come pretty close. But it's important to realize that we're not just "following some rules so we can get into heaven". The "rules" are designed to make us better people. To give us the lives that we would OURSELVES ultimately choose if we had the wisdom to choose them.

The second thing to realize is that even if Jesus isn't returning for the whole world tomorrow or next week, He might be returning for YOU that soon. Just because He isn't coming on the clouds doesn't mean it might not be your time to go see HIM. So we should live our lives in THAT constant expectation too, knowing that this could be our last breath. Tell your loved ones you love them. Live each day like it's your last, doing good and take care of others. You never know when it might actually be your last.

God, thank You for keeping our minds focused on what matters.