Living in Expectation

Made Flesh

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus says, and honestly, I pause. I pause because “Do not be afraid” is easier said than done. I pause because fear is real, especially for those that stand at the margins. 

I work as a Family Advocate and Chaplain at a transitional housing program. We serve unhoused and migrant families journeying towards stability. In this setting—waiting on food stamps, a possibility for permanent housing, or an immigration court date—fear isn’t theoretical. It lives in the body, and it lingers in trauma responses. It sticks around and warns the families I work with that one wrong move could potentially mean starting all over again. 

So when Jesus tells this “little flock” not to be afraid, I have to pause and reflect. 

I don’t hear it as a dismissal of fear or of the very real and very scary situations folks face on the daily. I hear it as a word of solidarity. 

Jesus isn’t gaslighting us into pretending that everything is fine. He isn’t asking us to suppress our trauma, or to adopt a toxic positivity that denies the grind and the grief of daily survival that many people know all too well. These words are spoken in solidarity by someone who knows suffering, who’s walked dusty roads with no place to lay his head, who’s felt betrayal, state violence, and spiritual anguish. It’s a word of presence and a reminder that fear doesn’t have to have the final word, not because we are one hundred percent sure that everything will turn out okay, but because we are not abandoned in the waiting and in the fearing. 

The text also tells us that “it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

To give.

Not sell.
Not loan.
Not gatekeep.
Give.

And yet… I wrestle with this promise, too.

Because some days, it doesn’t feel like the kingdom is being given. It feels like it’s being withheld, or rationed. The families I work with aren’t asking for thrones or riches. They’re asking for safe shelter, mental health care, a break from systems that keep moving the goalposts. And when they don’t get these things, it can be hard to believe that God is pleased to give them anything at all.

Yet still, I see them day by day, doing their best to show up with lamps lit and dressed for action as Jesus instructs!

In my context, readiness doesn’t always look like alert spirituality. It looks like keeping the phone charged in case the school calls, navigating public assistance paperwork in a second language, staying sober another day. That, too, is holy vigilance.

And maybe that’s the tension.

We’re invited to live in expectation. But lives at the margins are often shaped by delay. They’re shaped by knowing what it means to wait—not for a bridegroom, but for a housing voucher, a surgery date, a case review. They know what it’s like to stay up late, not out of devotion but because insomnia and fear won’t let them sleep. And yet, somehow, in this waiting, the kingdom can break through! 

I see it when families who often live paycheck to paycheck sign up to provide meals for a community member with a sick child. I see it in women who name their trauma without shame, who pray with a hope that doesn’t deny reality. 

The kingdom is not only future-tense. It shows up in the cracks, and in the generosity of those who shouldn’t have to give, and in the strength of those still learning to trust again.

So I pause, not hearing this passage as simple comfort. I hear it as tension: between promise and pain, giving and grieving, vigilance and vulnerability.

I also hear it as an invitation to live as though the kingdom is being given, even when the world says otherwise. To live generously, tenderly, and alertly, not because we are naive but because we are loved. Even here. 

Actually, especially here.

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Dwelling Among Us

What does “readiness” look like for those on the margins? What does it look like for you?

How might we practice trust, not as blind optimism, but as an act of resistance against despair?