The blessing of showing up

According to the Internet (and why would it lie?), filmmaker Woody Allen once said, “80% of success is just showing up.”

I thought about his statistic the other day when just showing up turned into a blessing for my husband, Bob.

Bob had spent a number of months two years ago mentoring a man, we’ll call Jay. Jobless, family-less, hope-less and discouraged, Jay couldn’t understand why his attempts to follow God had landed him in such a grim spot.

Bob didn’t have any quick answers either, but they spent weeks reading through and discussing Watchman Nee‘s Sit, Walk, Stand before touching on truth Bob had read in 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 at home, had him in for dinner. His desire to know what God had for him drove him back to Bob, where he picked his spiritual insight for understanding. Bob had never done anything like this before and 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 like many we’ve prayed and studied with over the years, we lost track of him.

Until Saturday at the pharmacy when Bob chose to run a menial task of the type 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’s joyous tale of reconciliation and remarriage to his wife, their children pleased at his return home, and a church ministry that astonished them both made us all rejoice.

Sure, Bob’s real work was done two years ago when he struggled to hear God’s direction in prayer and Bible study. But the blessing came, unexpectedly, when he just showed up and got to hear the rest of the story.

How often we forget that while God certainly can do enormous things like hold back the Red Sea or raise a man from that dead, for most of us, He works in the small, quiet voice, touching us with a blessing when we’re not really looking.

Thanks be to God.