So many of us were taught to just wait on God.

Pray. Believe. Stay faithful — and God would swoop in and rescue us before it was too late. Not eventually. Not someday. Before it was too late. That was the promise, implicit in every sermon about the end times, every warning about “these signs,” every reminder to stay ready because the rapture could happen at any moment.

I believed it too. For 36 years, across more denominations than I can count, I believed the rescue was coming. I danced at the altar. I preached it. I tried to live it out literally — because if the end was near, urgency made sense. Why build something that was about to be burned down anyway?

Here’s what nobody said out loud: every generation of Christians has believed they were living in the end times. Paul thought so. Reformers thought so. People said it after both World Wars, after 9/11, after every pandemic and natural disaster in between. If every century for two thousand years has qualified as “the end times,” the signs aren’t actually telling you anything about the world. They’re telling you something about the fear being cultivated in the room.

And Jesus himself said no one knows the day or the hour — not even him. So when someone points at current events and says “no surprise, we’re in the end times,” they’re not displaying discernment. They’re claiming a certainty Jesus explicitly said wasn’t available to anyone.

But I want to go further than “the timeline is wrong.” Because even if it were right, I don’t think it would matter — not for what we’re actually responsible for.

Here’s the part that took me years to see clearly: fixating on rescue is never neutral. It’s not just a belief about the future — it’s a posture in the present. If you’re waiting for God to swoop in and fix everything, then doing the work yourself starts to feel optional. Sometimes it starts to feel suspicious — like why bother repairing what’s about to be replaced. That posture doesn’t just excuse passivity. It trains you into it. It teaches you, sermon after sermon, to hold your hands open for a rescue instead of using them.

And that training is useful — just not to you. It’s useful to institutions that don’t want to be held accountable now, in this generation, for the harm they’ve caused. It’s much easier to defer justice to God’s timeline than to do the uncomfortable work of confronting it in your own church, your own family, your own community, today.

“Faith without works is dead” isn’t a throwaway verse. It’s not decoration. It’s a direct rebuttal to exactly this posture — the idea that belief and waiting are enough, that the work can be someone else’s job, that someone else’s job might even be God’s.

So no. No one is coming to save us. Not before it’s too late, not after — no one is coming.

We were created to save one another.

We were created to heal this world.

That’s not a smaller, sadder truth than the rescue story. It’s a bigger one. It means the healing doesn’t wait on a timeline none of us can read. It means the work is ours — not deferred, not outsourced, not contingent on faith being strong enough to summon a rescue that was never coming. It starts the moment we stop waiting and start doing what we were made to do.