You Are Not of This World

I was 13 years old on the most nerve-wracking night of my life. It was call night at the seminary, and my dad was going to be sent to who-knows-where. Well, we found out: Rural Nebraska. Understand—I was from Chicago. I thought Waco, Texas (a town of over 100,000) was utterly tiny when my dad had been a vicar there. And that night I found out that I would be moving to a town of 207 people.

Then I found out more. I was a good baseball player, but this place was so rural—they didn’t even have high school baseball. There went those plans. My high school was in a different county, 18 miles away. And I’ll admit, my first two years in Nebraska were full of massive culture shock. But as I moved into my junior year—and I realize especially looking back now—I made some great friends, it was a great school, and there were lots of wonderful things (even if unexpected) about it.

Then I started planning for college. I was going to be a research pharmacist. I was going to go to Creighton. I had a leg up on everyone; I had it all planned out. Then I received the acceptance letter from Creighton, but unfortunately, they expected my parents to contribute to my education far, far more than they could. And then the scholarship I was supposed to get at my backup school fell through, too. Suddenly my plans were tossed aside, and I ended up going to school in Oklahoma—yet another place to which I had no interest in going. It wasn’t what I had planned.

That first year at Oklahoma University was rough and the pharmacy program ended up not working out for me. It was a brutal freshman year. But it was a great place and had (and still has) a great campus ministry. Again, I had a wonderful time there and got a great education. It was far better than I would have planned. Oh, there were more disappointments in there—heartaches and frustrations—plenty of them. But yet, in the face of my plans going sideways and failing, God provided something really good, even if it wasn’t what I expected.

All right, we get it: This is where the old guy in the collar wags his finger and tells us not to worry because God has a great plan for our lives, blah, blah, blah. No. Frankly, there’s a part of me that would much rather have been a baseball player making eight figures or a pharmacist making six. And even though things turned out well, there were times in the middle when it just was lousy, and when you are in the middle of disappointment, “someday” doesn’t matter all that much.

St. Paul says in Ephesians 3: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever.” There’s a great lesson in this. Plans and intentions are fine. Sometimes they work out; sometimes they don’t. And we can get really frustrated when they don’t. Disappointment stinks on ice. But the truly wondrous thing I discovered was that whether my life was going great or spinning in ways I didn’t want it to go, God was always working out circumstances that were far more abundantly for my good than I could have thought.

He was forgiving me all my sins through Christ crucified. He was keeping me in my baptism. He was strengthening me in both faith towards Him and in fervent love for my neighbor in the Lord’s Supper. Even when my attention and focus was flitting all over dramas and what-ifs and what-might-havebeens, God remained faithful and just and kept on cleansing me from all unrighteousness. While I was distracted, sometimes by sorrow, sometimes by joy, Jesus kept right on being my Savior. And that was something far, far more wondrous than what I was normally focused on.

I hope you don’t have to face too much disappointment or drama—although in a fallen world some of that is just a given. I hope you have great and wild earthly successes. That’s all up in the air. I still face that unknown in my future. But either way, you and I—we are baptized. You know what that means? You don’t belong to this world with its pains or its joys. You belong to Christ, and He is at work in you, even when you don’t notice it. In Him you have eternal life, now and in the world to come. That’s certain and solid and for you, in good times and bad. And frankly, when you feel like you’re walking on Jello and everything’s changing, it’s pretty awesome that His steadfast love for you endures forever in Jesus.

Rev. Eric Brown is pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Herscher, Illinois.