The blessing of showing up

Sometimes, just showing up can be a blessing for someone else.

My friend Bob experienced that one day.

Bob spent several months two years ago mentoring a man, we’ll call Jay.

Jobless, family-less, hopeless, and discouraged, Jay couldn’t understand why following God had landed him in such a grim spot.

Bob didn’t have any quick answers either. They spent weeks reading and discussing Watchman Nee‘s Sit, Walk, Stand.

That finally led them to a truth Bob read in Nee’s The Spiritual Man.

What wisdom would an early 20th-century Chinese man have to share with 21st-century Americans? Plenty, because it’s rooted in the book of Ephesians and focused on our individual relationships to God.

We prayed for Jay. His desire to know what God had for him drove him back to Bob.

Bob had to listen closely to what the Holy Spirit directed him to say and do.

Both men flourished in the spiritual discipline. One day, it was over. Jay had learned enough and went on with his life.

As with others we’ve prayed and studied with through the years, we lost track of him.

A changed man

Until Saturday at the pharmacy, when Bob chose to run a menial task he’d seldom done before. And there he ran into Jay. A different man.

Bob’s face shone as he described the blessing of showing up and hearing a wonderful story. Jay had reconciled with his wife, and they remarried. Their children were pleased, and they’d begun a church ministry that astonished them both.

Bob finished his real work two years ago when Jay struggled to hear God’s direction in prayer and Bible study. But the blessing came when he “just happened” to show up to hear the rest of the story.

How often do we forget that, while God certainly can do enormous things like parting the Red Sea,

He often works in surprising ways.

And then touches us with a blessing when we’re not really looking.

Thanks be to God.