The Night Shift at Cape Canaveral

In March 2024, a small team of technicians at Cape Canaveral sat through the dead hours before a SpaceX launch. The countdown clock read T-minus four hours. Then three. Then two. Coffee went cold. Conversations drifted to weekend plans. One technician, Maria Reyes, later told reporters she almost missed a pressure anomaly in the fuel line because her attention had wandered to her phone. Almost. But she caught it — because twenty years of discipline had trained her hands to keep checking gauges even when her eyes were tired.

That is the kind of watchfulness Jesus demands in Mark 13. He does not tell His disciples the hour. He does not give them a countdown clock. He gives them something harder: an open-ended wait. Stay awake. Keep watch. You do not know when the master of the house will return — at evening, at midnight, at cockcrow, or at dawn.

Most of us can stay alert when we know the deadline. It is the undefined waiting that undoes us. The mortgage payment we stop praying about. The marriage we stop tending. The faith we let idle because nothing dramatic seems imminent.

But the Son of Man will come in power and glory, as certain as sunrise. And the servants He commends will not be the ones who predicted the hour. They will be the ones whose hands were still on the gauges, faithful in the ordinary dark, watching — not because they saw the signs, but because the Master told them to.