Sooner or later, everybody asks the same question. You get the news, whatever the news is, and once the first wave passes, once the shock thins out enough to make space to think, the question’s there: What comes next?

It’s the question after the layoff. After the diagnosis. After the election results come in, the floor drops out. After somebody you trusted tells you the future you’d been counting on ain’t happening. What comes next?

It’s the question the disciples can’t get past in Matthew 17, even though we almost never notice it. We’re so eager to get to the mountain, to the light, to the voice from the cloud, that we skip right over the time signature.

But Matthew put it there on purpose: “Six days later.” He’s precise about this period of time in a way he usually isn’t. And it matters, because what happened six days before changes everything about what happens next.

Six days earlier, in chapter 16, Jesus tells his disciples in a way that shatters illusions that he’s going to Jerusalem, that he’ll be handed over to the authorities, and that he’ll suffer and be killed. Peter pulls Jesus aside and chews him out—rebukes him, the text says. “This will never happen to you, Lord.”

But Jesus rounds on him with a ferocity that must have left everybody else a bit jittery: “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me.”

Then, Jesus sets down the fine print: “If you want to follow me, deny yourself. Take up your cross.”

Remember that whole scene?

At least the way Matthew tells it, that’s the last thing the disciples heard before six days of silence. And you know what they were asking themselves around the fire every night. They were asking: What now? What comes next?

Think about how excruciating that must have been. Six days is a long time to stew, isn't it?

“We left everything for this? Our boats. Our families. Our livelihoods. And now he’s telling us that the whole thing gets blown up in Jerusalem with a state-sponsored execution?

So, what do we do now?”

Let’s think about that for a minute. Because I imagine most of us know what six days like that feel like.

We get the email from the principal: “Can you come in next Tuesday morning? It’s about your child.” No explanation. Just a time. So we wait. We pack lunches. We answer emails. We scroll our phones like it’s going to deliver a cure for uncertainty. We laugh at something on TV and feel guilty for laughing. The world keeps moving, but the brakes on our world have locked up.

The rumor starts moving through town, through the church, through the group chat: layoffs are coming next week, a school might close, ICE is planning a visit to your city. Nothing official yet, not much we can point to. So we wait. We keep showing up, keep making small talk, keep doing the normal things. But the normal things feel like cardboard props.

It’s the election results that landed like a brick, and we still had to pack lunches, drive carpool, and go to physical therapy at 10:00 the next morning.

It’s the moment a relationship ended, not with a dramatic scene, but with a slow unraveling that left us standing in the kitchen at 6 a.m., wondering what any of it was for.

Six days is a long time to sit with news that blows up, if not “the” world, then at least “a” world or a set of worlds dear to you and everything you care about.

Six days is long enough to cycle through anger and bargaining and something that isn’t quite acceptance. It’s long enough to start second-guessing everything.

But the truth of it is, we don’t sit with that kind of looming disaster well, do we? I mean, how could we?