“Jesus replied to them, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’” (John 12:23 CSB)
Devotional
Some of the most important moments in our lives do not announce themselves as important. They arrive looking like loss. Like an ending. Like the thing you were afraid of finally happening. Jesus says these words right at the moment when the religious leaders are plotting to kill him, when the crowd’s enthusiasm is about to evaporate, when the cross is close enough to touch. And he calls it: the hour of glorification.
That inversion is worth sitting with. Because most of us are waiting for the hard season to be over before we expect God to do something significant. We put life on hold. We survive until things improve. We assume that glory comes after the difficulty, not through it. But Jesus is standing right at the edge of his own death and saying, this is it. This is the moment. Not in spite of what is coming, but because of it.
What makes this more than just a theological statement is the seed imagery he reaches for right after this. A grain of wheat, alone in the dark, surrounded by soil, looking for all the world like nothing is happening. And that is exactly where the life is beginning. I think about the seasons in my own life that felt like that. The job offer that never came. The house we thought was ours until it was not. The business idea I poured myself into that just did not go anywhere. The friends we lost along the way. Things I grieved at the time, and later understood differently. Not always easily or quickly, but differently.
God does not waste the dark seasons. He works in them. The hour that feels most like burial is often the one He has been preparing us for. That is not a cliche meant to rush past the pain. The pain is real. But so is the God who is present in it, doing something we cannot yet see.
We are not Jesus, and our suffering is not his. But we do follow a Saviour who showed us that the path to glory runs straight through surrender, not around it. That changes how we hold the hard things. Not with gritted teeth and forced optimism, but with a quiet confidence that the hour we are in is not outside His plans. It may be right in the middle of them.
Reflection
I want to be honest about the season I am in right now rather than pretending it is fine. I also want to hold it differently, as something God is present in, not something He has left me to manage alone. I do not need to understand it fully to trust that He is at work in it. That feels like something worth practising today.
Prayer
Father, we do not always recognise the hours You are at work in. We tend to look for You in the comfortable moments and lose sight of You in the hard ones. Remind us that You are not absent from the dark. Help us to trust that the things in our lives that feel like endings might be exactly where You are beginning something. We want to hold our hours the way Jesus held his, with trust in You.