Prayer Tip--Resurrection Stories: Ordinary Everyday Encounters

Nobody tells you that starting over looks a lot like just… continuing.

There’s no dramatic moment where the fog lifts and everything clicks into place. You just wake up one day in a life that doesn’t quite match the one you pictured, and you keep going anyway. Which is, it turns out, very on-brand for the human experience. (Comforting and deeply annoying, in equal measure.) I’ve been there more than once.

In 2014, my marriage ended, and my brother called from Hawaii and said come. I went. Not because Hawaii was going to fix anything… grief is remarkably good at finding a seat on the same flight… but sometimes you need to walk the road somewhere else for a while. I spent a year in Mililani, and Jesus was everywhere in it. In my niece and nephew. In the hours I sat on the beach watching the waves roll in and go back out like they had absolutely nowhere else to be. In the women at my brother’s church who loved on me without requiring me to be further along than I was. In the mountain trails. In the unexpected moments that took my breath away.

A lot of those I didn’t recognize until later. Some I’m probably still figuring out.

This is the thing about the road to Emmaus that I find both comforting and humbling. Two of Jesus’ followers are walking away from Jerusalem, gutted by grief, and the risen Jesus falls into step right beside them. They don’t recognize him. They walk for miles. They tell him the whole story of his own life and death, which, if you think about it too long, is extremely relatable… confidently explaining something to someone who knows infinitely more about it than you do. (We’ve all been there.)

And Jesus, bless him, just keeps walking. He doesn’t announce himself. He doesn’t fix it. He just stays. It’s not until they stop at the end of the road, until they turn to this stranger and say stay with us… not knowing who they’re asking, just knowing they don’t want him to go… that everything opens up. He breaks bread and they see him. Right there at an ordinary table at the end of an ordinary road.

The presence was never late. The recognition just needed time.

I think about that when Jesus shows up in my Kansas life when I least expect it. In a chance encounter with someone new that I’m still thinking about a week later. In a hug from a hurting volunteer that I needed as much as she did. In a lyric landing differently than it ever has before. In a sunrise so unreasonably beautiful I have to pull over just to let it happen to me.

These are not the moments that announce themselves. They sneak up on you. And if you’re not paying attention, you can walk right past them.

Hawaii taught me to look. I’m still learning. But I know now that the risen Christ has a habit of getting on the road with people who are mid-story and lost and not quite where they expected to be by now.

Which is, depending on the day, either the best news I’ve ever heard or the thing that makes me cry in my car on a Tuesday. (Usually both.)