The Surgeon Who Waited

In 2010, a young mother named Clara Benitez sat in a hospital waiting room in Houston, clutching her phone, watching the minutes crawl by. Her three-year-old daughter Mia needed emergency heart surgery, and the pediatric cardiac surgeon — the only one qualified for this particular repair — was forty-five minutes away. Clara begged the nurses to start, to do something, anything. But the attending physician shook his head. "We need his hands for this. No one else can do what he does."

Those forty-five minutes felt like forty-five years. Clara later described them as the loneliest stretch of her life. She was surrounded by people who cared, yet none of them could fix what was broken. When the surgeon finally arrived, calm and unhurried, Clara wanted to scream at him. But he walked into that operating room and did what no one else in that building could do. Mia came home four days later.

Martha felt that same desperate fury when Jesus finally arrived in Bethany. "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died." She wasn't wrong — and Jesus didn't correct her grief. He wept with her. But then He did what no one else in all of creation could do. He stood before a sealed tomb and called death itself to surrender.

Sometimes the Almighty's delay isn't absence. It's the space He creates so that when He acts, everyone in the room knows — only He could have done this.