Sunday, 28 June 2026 — Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: 2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a
Second Reading: Romans 6:3-4, 8-11
Gospel: Matthew 10:37-42
Full text on USCCB: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062826.cfm
What is the good thing you have quietly decided God will never give you? I do not mean the small disappointments. I mean your deepest wish. This is the thing you once prayed for with all your heart, but have now put away as a closed door. You feel it is no longer worth asking for. Most of us have this kind of pain. And most of us have stopped naming it, even to God.
Long ago, there was a woman like this in a town called Shunem. She lived a comfortable life. She had a house, a husband, and friends. When a holy man often traveled through, she built him a small room on her roof. She gave him a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp (2 Kings 4:10). She asked for nothing. When the prophet offered to repay her, she said she needed nothing (2 Kings 4:13).
But there was one thing she did not have. She had no child. In her world, this was a very heavy sadness. It meant she had no future family to carry on her name. She surely prayed for a son in the past. But by the time we meet her, she had stopped. She had hidden her hope so deeply that when the prophet promised her a son within a year, she did not celebrate. She stepped back in fear. Do not lie to me, she said (2 Kings 4:16). This is not the voice of a woman who forgot. This is the voice of a woman who felt that hoping again, and being hurt again, would simply cost too much. Yet, God reached past her quiet sadness, right into the very thing she had stopped asking for.
Most of us live exactly where she lived. We are not at the happy moment when the answer comes. And we are not at the beginning, when we still believed it would come quickly. We live in the long middle. This is the hard time of waiting between losing something and finally finding it.
Think of a man who walked for three days toward a place he did not know. He carried wood for the most terrible sacrifice a father could imagine. The road gave him no answers. He saw no sign that he was close. He heard no voice to tell him he was right. He only took the next step, and the next. He walked in the dark feeling of not knowing if God would speak before the end. That man was Abraham, and the boy beside him was his son (Genesis 22). His only comfort was a quiet sentence he kept saying. He said that God Himself would provide (Genesis 22:8). He could not see the animal hiding in the bushes to take his son’s place. He could not see the beautiful morning waiting for him. He could only keep walking. The Bible tells us how his journey started and ended. But it says almost nothing about those three quiet days in between, because we all go through those same hard days of waiting.
Right in the middle of our long road, Jesus gives us a strange promise. He says that whoever loses his life for His sake will find it (Matthew 10:39). Then He says something even more surprising. Anyone who gives even a cup of cold water to a little child, He says, will never lose his reward (Matthew 10:42). A cup of cold water. A small room with a lamp. These are not grand or famous actions. They are the small, daily acts of faith ordinary people do during their long time of waiting. They are the kind welcome, the table set, and the light left on, long after they stopped expecting a reward. The woman did not do these good things just to get a baby as a payment. She just kept the room ready. God’s gift came right through the door of the simple room she had prepared.
So please, keep your room ready. On the days you have strong faith, and on the days you do not, just keep giving out that simple cup of cold water. And the one deep wish you stopped asking for, the one you put away as closed, bring it back to God this week. Even if you can only whisper its name once in the dark, that is enough. God does not ask you to pull the sun up into the sky. He only asks you to keep a little oil in your lamp. The morning light is His to bring. And when His bright morning comes, it will be far better than anything you ever settled for.