Eye-open waiting — Tim Chilvers (19 July 2026)

And as we continue this series that we've simply called Wait For It, about how we wait...

Many of us are longing for something, healing, hope, a new job, a partner, direction, clarity, stability, peace.

When as it were, we're longing for the dawn.

And at the moment, it is night.

For now we are people of the night.

This morning, we're going to think about this metaphor, this motif that is throughout the Bible, the idea of being in a night time.

And as you get your head around this, as you look at pages of the Bible, whether you call yourself Christian or not, as you begin to get into this, you'll begin to see it everywhere.

We all know if we watch movies, sometimes you see certain things and it's a kind of motif of something else.

Well, throughout scriptures where the word night is mentioned or the concept of being at night time, it often points to something very, very profound.

But we talk about it in our culture, don't we? We talk of nightmares and daydreams.

We don't talk of nightdreams and daymares.

Night equals negative.

Day equals positive.

We think of vampires and Draculas.

When do they come out? At night.

We talk of the dark night of the soul.

If you're a superhero fan, Batman only comes at night because that's when the darkness falls and evil happens in Gotham.

Some of us know what it's like to have night terrors.

Night, negative.

And perhaps one of the most visceral in our day is this book by Elie Wiesel, simply called Night.

His own recollections of being in Auschwitz with these early words where he says, never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp that turned my life into one long night.

So nighttime, darkness, bleakness, difficulty, heaviness.

But it's not just that.

It's also there are implications in our culture of a sort of questionable, dubious actions and morality.

I remember when I was growing up, people used to use the phrase, ladies of the night.