In 1981, cell phones are less likely in the future than the giant appliances the Jetsons use to make video calls. Out of the cash I should have shepherded better through the week, and with only a quarter tank in the Cutlass Supreme Coupe my parents handed down to me from my sister’s good choices, I put a laundry bag in the back seat and head home for the weekend. The gas will get me there. What I don’t know is how I will get back. An amalgam of childish dependence, youthful optimism, personal pride, and sincere faith makes me unwilling to ask anyone but my parents for help, and they are not home. But I have obligations at my church on Sunday, so, like every Friday that first semester, I go.
Sunday night, duties done, I linger with people in the foyer expecting God to provide any moment. I hint not one word of need to anyone. I remember the silent, dark walk to the car to start the frenzied race to beat my freshman dorm’s curfew to Waco. There is no one left at the church, no one in the parking lot, and I have as much gas left in my faith as in my car’s tank. I can at least hope the car gets me back to my parents’ house, where I can deal with the embarrassment of poor planning and missing classes which, at the time, feels like failing out of life.
Abraham travelled a lot further than Waco to Arlington on nothing but the promise that God would eventually show him a destination. David gathered materials for a temple he knew he would not build. Esther approached a king with the real prospect that “if I perish, I perish.” And while Jesus does not command us to be as theologically uninformed and irrational as a 1981 college freshman, he does say our faith should make us daily more like ravens and lilies than retiring barn builders.
Lily wilted, I open the car door in the dark parking lot and—I kid you not—there lies a ten dollar bill folded over the steering wheel. Per the psalmist: The Lord preserves even the naïve.
If you are not sure you have enough gas in the tank to face what is coming; if what you do have is undeserved: take faith’s steps, open the door, and see what God provides, where God takes you, this year.
To a week trusting that the goodness and abundance is entirely God’s.