Subtle Revelations

This past weekend, a man I’ve known for decades went to church for the first time.

I was astonished when my father told me this, because I thought this man already went to church.  I assumed him to be Christian because my entire hometown community claims to be: following Christ there is viewed as an act of civic virtue.   

At any rate, that wasn’t the case for this particular man, whom I will nickname Ted. 

My father and I marveled at the new development.  We also wondered what had prompted it.  Ted has cancer that is not getting better—but he has had cancer that is not getting better for some time now.  His wife is also struggling with health issues—but she has been struggling with health issues for some time now.

My father pondered.  Was it, perhaps, that Ted—a friend of his—had heard him talking about church and the church work he does?  Was it simply a matter of Ted coming to terms due to his illness and his wife’s frailty?  Was it, as my uncle suggested, the card I had sent them a week ago mentioning that I kept them in prayer?

Maybe all of the above or none of the above.  Or maybe, more likely, everything together and some others things we’ll never be able to guess.

It has astonished me lately to realize the degree to which actions in sum can have on others, when we assume that an action in particular is what makes the difference.  The breaking or changing of a heart can be caused by a single heartbreaking incident, but more often than not occurs as the cumulative result of ten thousand incidents, multiple moments and words.

This is a wonderfully helpful, and deeply uncomfortable, truth.

It is a wonderful truth because, in many ways, it can relieve of us of our fear of failure.  We don’t have to be the be-all, end-all for someone: we just need to add our grain of justice and love and humility and mercy in hopes that cumulatively we can tip the scale.  God works through the engagements and efforts of many people to recover those He loves; we needn’t fear that He’ll only do it through one person or not at all.

I think this is why what I call drive-by evangelism sometimes works in spite of itself.  I am generally not a fan of cold-calling people to Jesus—and yet there are those who swear by it as a way of bringing people to Christ.  While I am skeptical of those claims on a broad level, I do believe that sometimes drive-by evangelists come by at the right moment and end up tipping someone from indecision to decision.  I’ve experienced it myself in college, when a woman told me she’d been thinking of becoming a Christian but had wondered if God was really speaking to her: she promised she’d come to church if someone asked.  I was the one who asked.

But the way God reaches people—through a combination of people and events and insights and understandings—is also an uncomfortable truth because, like much of God’s work, it is long and incremental and slow.

I recently completed a project at work that took a year and a half total.  I anticipated it, initially, to last two terms, max.  And as the project dragged on and mutated and evolved and regressed and progressed through its many, many iterations, I often left meetings sagging and bewildered.

What is the point?  Are we accomplishing anything at all?

We were, it turned out in the end.  Something quite significant.  But it took the combined efforts of eight people, countless meetings, working backchannels, awkward one-on-ones, and hours of compiling data to get us there.  And while any one of those activities seems meaningless or even fruitless on its own, the combination of all of them finally pushed that boulder over the hill.

And this is why persistence in small acts of love matter.

And this is why you should keep your eyes open.

I don’t know why, after decades of following Christ, I still expect God to answer via the grand gesture: the column of smoke, the gouts of fire lapping up idol altars, the thundering presence He exhibited before Job.  But more often than not He speaks to me through a culmination of events: a comment, a Scripture, a passage in a book, my husband’s stray remark, a revelation in prayer. 

We can miss any or all of these things if we aren’t paying attention.  God still uses these subtle methods of the many to encourage us and cheer us, to soothe us, to guide us.  He will speak into our life in a chorus of ways that still serve in the end as one unifying Voice.

What brought Ted to church?

God, of course.  But in the way that only God can—relentlessly, lovingly, in every small act of grace, every revelation, every call, every moment, every thought.  Instead of  looking for him in one central lightning-from-the-sky message, maybe we can be attentive to the King of Heaven at work in a thousand different ways, all at once and everywhere—like yeast in bread, like roots spreading underground.

Don’t miss the subtle revelations.