The Four-Day Wait in the ICU

When Marcus Rivera's wife collapsed at a grocery store in El Paso, the doctors told him the brain bleed was catastrophic. For four days, Marcus sat in the ICU waiting room while friends whispered that he should prepare for the worst. His pastor came. His mother came. Everyone spoke in the past tense about Elena, as though she were already gone.

On the fourth day, the neurologist walked in with a scan that made no medical sense. The swelling had reversed. Elena was breathing on her own. Within a week, she was sitting up, asking for her daughters.

Marcus later told his congregation something that stuck with everyone who heard it. "I kept praying for God to show up on day one. I was angry He didn't. By day three, I had written the eulogy in my head. But God wasn't late. He was doing something I couldn't see on the scan."

Martha said nearly the same thing two thousand years earlier. "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died." She had watched the hours pass, then the days. She had buried Lazarus by the time Jesus arrived. But Jesus wasn't late. He was walking straight into the impossible so that everyone standing at that tomb would know exactly who He was.

The Almighty doesn't operate on our timetable. Sometimes He waits until day four — until every human option has expired — so that when life returns, no one mistakes the source.