Tracing God's Faithfulness

when you don't know where you're going

The Intern with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway is one of my favorite movies. I love the juxtaposition of what’s expected and what actually happens. The friendship the main characters develop is beautiful, crossing generational and power divides, and turning into a force for good for both of them. I haven’t watched it in a while—I should remedy that—but my husband keeps bringing it up, teasing me because I’ve started an internship at the church we’ve been attending. There are nine interns total and the rest of them are either in college or barely out.¹ It’s been a great experience so far, though I have felt a little…old. 

I had a conversation with someone on staff and we discussed how we ended up where we were in life. We both agreed that we rarely saw it in advance; instead we step (sometimes flail) forward from one thing to the next. My jokes about God sending me an email with details resonate with others too. We’d like a plan and often God simply shows us the next step. And then the next step after that. This is wise on his part because I’m sure I’d yell “see you later God” as I ran off to do the plan on my own if He told me in advance. 

Instead, we take the next step. We respond to how God moves and then God moves again. We respond and there’s a beautiful back and forth that happens. That’s because we have a relationship with God. Sometimes I would prefer God was a computer that printed out directions in black and white and I could simply blindly obey. But God isn’t a computer. And He isn’t after robots; He’s developing people. 

Once this back and forth, take-the-next-step has been going on for a while, we can look back and trace part of God’s direction. We see how that place where we felt stuck actually prepared us for the next thing. We see how a thread has been pulled through every single stage of our lives and finding those threads is often helpful in determining the next right thing. 

I grew up in a church that emphasized reading the Bible. I’m continually grateful for that now but I took it seriously even then. That’s how twelve-year-old me ended up lying on my bedroom floor reading through Ezekiel in the King James and somehow loving it. I never stopped it. I’m copying Hebrew verses for a seminary class because of the fascination I developed in Isaiah over twenty years ago. God has continually led me along that path though I would have never envisioned being here.

When I became a mother, I started blogging. It began as a way to update family on our oldest son’s medical condition but soon morphed into something else as I rediscovered my love of words. It felt like a homecoming. I hadn’t written in years but as a child and even a teenager I had filled notebook after notebook with moody poetry, bad short stories, and lists of ideas. I’m writing this to you now because of both of those things and how one thing moved into another. None of it seemed like a big deal at at the time. Only looking back can I see how those things were exactly what I needed at the time and also a building block for what was next. 

When we see how God has moved us gently, though often unexpectedly, from one thing to the next, we develop trust.² We see God’s faithfulness. We see His intention. We see a design instead of the disorder that life often feels like. 

I often need those reminders. Every stage seems to have its own form of chaos and it can feel just crazy enough that I can’t make sense out of it. I can’t see the design. I certainly can’t see what’s next as much as I would like to. But when I look back I see a design. I see God at work. And I believe He is still working. One day I’ll look back at this and see His hand here too. And this part will lead into the next as well. 

Maybe you’ve lost sight of a design in your life. It’s easy sometimes to forget God’s faithfulness, to be sure that what you are seeing cannot possibly be part of anything beautiful. To feel forgotten, abandoned in the wilderness.Maybe it would be worth spending a little bit of time looking back at your life and tracing the threads. We might all rest more in the present and feel more peace looking at the future if we remembered God is at work. 

I still have questions. I still drag some doubts with me.But I also see a growing picture of God’s faithfulness. That faithfulness carries me. 

1. Fuller requires all the MDiv students to complete an apprenticeship and this is mine.

2. This is not to pretend that horrible things do not happen in our lives because of sin. We do not have to cloak that as a picture of God’s faithfulness though we find Him being faithful even there.