Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

As Jesus gets closer and closer to his death, he takes the time to coach his

followers on what it means to wait well, because they and the rest of the church

will be waiting for his return for quite some time. We still are in fact.

When we're waiting for something, that process can produce a lot of different emotions in us.

Maybe you grow especially impatient and frustrated, that usually happens when you're really excited about what you're waiting for.

On the other hand, if you're not looking forward to it,

maybe you're filled with dread or maybe you forget altogether that it's going to happen.

Jesus knows humanity and he knows that we're more

likely to treat his return like the thing we're not super excited about. First of all,

we don't have any concept of what we're entering into so it's more common to be

scared of something like that because it

feels like a bit of an unknown. Second, it's easier to want things we are familiar with, like

kids and husbands and vacations to Croatia and those things take up our mental and emotional energy instead.

In today's reading Jesus encourages us to wait well, then he tells us why that's important.

He starts out with the Parable of the Ten Virgins, which is a cult who steward our time wisely while we wait.

They all have lamps, but only half of them get oil. They just don't think about the future. They live in the moment.

It slipped their minds that

there was anything they might need to prepare for. This reminds me of what

Jesus has been saying so frequently for the past few days. Stay awake.

Don't be lulled to sleep by the world in its priorities.

Especially early on in Christianity, there were people who even took this literally.

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