Matthew 25:13

This verse closes one of Jesus's most vivid parables about readiness. In the story, ten young women wait for a wedding celebration to begin, holding lamps to light the way when the bridegroom arrives. Five brought extra oil; five didn't. When the bridegroom arrived much later than anyone expected, the five without enough oil rushed out to find more — and while they were gone, the doors closed and the celebration began without them. In first-century Jewish culture, weddings were major communal events involving significant anticipation and ceremony. Jesus uses the image of the bridegroom's unpredictable timing to talk about his own eventual return — and the importance of being genuinely prepared, not merely enthusiastic at the start.

Lord, I don't want to be caught running on empty. Help me not to mistake familiarity with faith, or past enthusiasm for present readiness. Keep me close — not out of fear, but out of love for you. Amen.

Five of those women fully intended to be ready. They showed up. They had their lamps. They were at the right place, waiting for the right event. What they failed to account for was how long the wait would actually be. This parable isn't really about people who forgot to come — it's about people who underestimated the cost of sustained readiness. Enthusiasm at the beginning is easy. Keeping oil in the lamp through the slow, unremarkable stretch of waiting — that's something else entirely. "Keep watch" isn't a call to low-grade anxiety about end-times timelines. Jesus is pointing at something quieter and harder: the slow drift that happens when nothing urgent is pressing. When faith becomes assumption. When prayer becomes an item on a list. When you realize, with a kind of quiet alarm, that you've been running on fumes for months and barely noticed. The antidote isn't better eschatological charts — it's the ordinary faithfulness of keeping your lamp filled today, and tomorrow, and on the unremarkable Tuesdays when nothing feels significant at all.