In his now much quoted 2005 Stanford address, Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” Looking back over a given period in our lives we can connect the dots and see where God has been actively working through us and those around us. What poses a much greater challenge is to trust that God is right with us in the here and now, in every single moment, and has the dots of our future in His hands.

At work last week I was observed and assessed as part of performance management in my job as a teacher. I was having a challenging week and the day before I began to seriously doubt whether I could successfully get through it. As I was considering whether to ask if it could be postponed, the woman who was to do the observation came to discuss another matter with me. I came very close to asking. When she left I realised that God had clearly been telling me not to, assuring me that even though it seemed a tough task, that the dots would lead to peace, not disaster. (Jeremiah 29:11). Indeed they did. Despite having a heavy workload of her own, a very dear colleague turned her energy to me and stayed for 3 hours to help me prepare. We have been praying together in a quiet room we recently discovered was free, so that evening the first thing we did was to pray for God’s wisdom and strength. From there, we began to discuss ideas and eventually formed a plan. At several points she warned me of the danger of thinking too much about each detail or of changing my mind about things we had decided on, that those things were not from God. Instead she reminded me of our prayer, and that now we had to trust that God was providing exactly what we needed.

On the day of the observation I received the grace of courage and an inner peace and calm that could only have come from God. There was such power in that peace, I felt released to be who I was created to be, trusting that God is in charge. I heard someone recently describe faith as believing that even when you are in a situation you do not like, no matter how stuck you feel or how long you have been in it, God can transform it. In her book “Inner Compass (1999)”, Margaret Silf invites us to trust that God’s Spirit will hover over the mess, bringing wholeness out of brokenness, as once that same Spirit brought creation out of chaos.

Even after experiencing and witnessing the fruits of faith, both in my life and the lives of others, I can quickly find myself fearful and doubting. “I know you were there then God, in an amazing way, but what about next time?” Or, in the next step I can find myself walking back down paths I have painfully learned many times lead me away from God. But I have come to understand that at such times, God does not want us to be consumed with guilt, as that takes us further away from Him. The gift of forgiveness is always there, if we can but first forgive ourselves. I am greatly encouraged by the fact that despite living alongside him, hearing his teachings and witnessing his miracles first hand, Jesus’ own disciples repeatedly struggled to believe what was before their very eyes. Jesus knows our human nature. He does not give up on us and certainly does not want us to give up on ourselves. The Spirit repeats over and over, in as many ways as necessary, the call to have faith in the power of God. Though we cannot connect the dots looking forward, we can pray for the will to surrender all in ever deepening trust that we are being led in our mission to serve God and be a light in the world.