This week, a friend of mine announced he’ll retire from architecture next month at the age of ninety. In many ways, technology drove him from the profession. Email, PDFs, scanning documents, saving documents in folders – it’s all foreign to him. And I’ve been trying to help him with all this once a week, but it’s not enough.
In some regards, I really feel for him. He’s been doing this his entire adult life. In other regards, I envy him. He’ll get to read good books and study the Bible even more than he does now. But I’m sure it’ll be an adjustment for him.
Watching him step away from a lifetime of work makes me think about how often change arrives without asking permission. I’ve never been quick to adapt. It usually takes me a while to catch up emotionally to what has already changed around me.
Maybe that’s why seasons of transition often feel like wandering. Not feeling lost exactly … but not settled either. We’re asked to leave something familiar without fully knowing what comes next. When I read the story of Abram in Genesis 12, I’m struck by how little clarity he was given at the beginning – only enough to take the next step. His call was to leave his country to wherever God leads.
Following Christ sounds simple enough, but the where is rarely spelled out ahead of time. The Christian lives his or her life coram deo (before the face of God). In other words, everything we do is in front of him. Living coram deo means showing up faithfully in ordinary places, trusting that God is arranging encounters we cannot yet see.
A friend of mine meets with some guys in a Burger King to read the Bible with them. Last week, a woman noticed them and returned to the restaurant after she and her husband left to ask if the group of guys were people of the Bible. After learning they were, she asked for prayer. Her husband wanted to adopt her son, and they were going before a judge the next day. The group prayed for her.
Two days later, my buddy had twenty minutes to spare when someone was running late for a meeting. He stopped into a store to pick up some notebooks and the woman from Burger King called his name. Turns out, she works at that store. She told him the adoption went through.
I find great encouragement in that. One Christian simply showed up faithfully in an ordinary place, and God did more than my friend could have anticipated. I suspect the encounter strengthened them both.
Following God seems to have less to do with knowing exactly where we’re going and more to do with recognizing his presence as we move. A retirement decision. A prayer in a Burger King. An unexpected reunion in a store aisle. None of it looks especially dramatic on its own, but taken together, it feels like quiet evidence that God is always leading.
