A Thousand Things, All at Once

Never presume to know God's reasons

A little blurb about the next Rule of Life workshop on October 18, 11am - 3pm EST:

In this newsletter, I like to talk about topics like forgiveness, community, prayer, and love. These are topics at the heart of the Christian faith, but too often, we only discuss them in the abstract and fail to imagine the role they ought to play in our daily lives. I have a Rule of Life workshop coming up on Oct. 18, and one of the tasks of crafting a Rule of Life to consider how we take ideas and commands and translate them into practices and habits for the life God has given us. If that strikes a chord with you, I hope you consider joining. Learn more and register here.

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“God is always doing a thousand things at once.”

It was the night of a small going-away party, in 2022, and one of our pastors said this to us as the party broke up. Night had fallen, and spring was thawing into summer. Our pastor knew Ryan and I were heartbroken to leave the home we’d made in Toronto with our family since 2011. He also knew we were certain, at least, that God was moving us to Cincinnati to be closer to my mother to care for her.

Certainty—of all kinds—makes meaning. And meaning, as someone once said, makes things bearable.

But when our pastor spoke of God’s power to accomplish multiple purposes in a single genius stroke, I imagined he might have been cautioning us against presuming what God might be up to. Beware your certainties, he could very well have meant. Though we think we can faithfully trace the providential logic between cause and effect, our conclusions tend toward the limitations of human wisdom. How to know the intentions of the one who spoke the world into being? How to imagine we can be sure of his plans?

I’ve thought so much of this idea—of God achieving a thousand purposes simultaneously—over the last two years. Did we move for my mother? There’s a certain obviousness to one answer, given that I can now regularly help her with the things that have become more difficult for her. I can remember to buy her hand soap. I can launder the sheets if they’re forgotten in the weekly housekeeping rhythms. I can drive her to appointments and tell the hairstylist how she likes the length of her hair. There’s no doubt in my mind that our proximity allows for the comfort of presence alongside many practical interventions.

But these don’t seem to be the only divine purposes that have plunked us down in the heart of it all (as Ohio’s slogan goes). Maybe there were purposes for our two remaining sons at home, in their transition to a new school, new church, new friendships. I can hardly think without tears of that Sunday morning, only months after our move, when their youth pastor stood at the front of the sanctuary, holding the elements of communion. “Christ’s body, broken for you,” he said with such earnestness to each of our sons, whom he’d already been regularly inviting for lunch and basketball. That they’re now enfolded in a spiritual community, being mentored and taught to serve? Surely this wasn’t incidental to God’s purposes in this move. Surely that is a more than you ask for or imagine kind of gift.

Or maybe the move was for Ryan, who found the transition to a new work role challenging—and the lethargic, isolated rhythms of remote work even more difficult. Did the move finally precipitate the occasion for a professional change, allowing him to cut the cord of the safe and familiar for a creative, strategic opportunity that has all the fun of complexity and real decision-making power? I’ll never be able to adequately express my gratitude to my husband for leaving a job he loved to take one he didn’t that we might—together—take care of my mother. And to think that he’s now released from that job into work better suited for his incredible talents and gifts. Can God really do that?

Or maybe this is something here for me, in this moving closer to the family identity and obligations I might well have been shirking for the last twenty-odd years. Maybe this is about my own formation, about the final release for all the fossilized resentments and estrangement of blame. Maybe God knew that in moving closer to my mother, I was moving closer to a deeper experience of divine mercy, understanding the grace involved in forgetting (and forgiving). Had we remained in Toronto, would I have ultimately been smaller-of-soul? Would I have missed out on the opportunity to be loved, together with my mom, in this church community who is praying us through this heartache?

There’s so much more to write of this story, and I realize I can’t put anyone but God at the very center of it. God is doing a thousand things at once—which is to say that none of us can fathom all the ways he’s at work to repair and redeem, to accomplish and sustain the good he always intends.

God is making a thousand things new, all at once.