Guiding Lightly

By Audrey Stallsmith

Sometimes my guinea fowl don’t remember that night is coming. Even the also free-ranging old black hen that seems to be developing a case of avian Alzheimer's knows enough to take herself off to the coop long before the sun sets.

However, on occasion, when I go out to close the door for her at dusk, I find the guineas either trying to perch on the porch rail or wandering about disconsolately under the tree where they usually roost. If they put off “going to bed” too long, they can’t see well enough to jump up in the dark.

Then I aim the beam of my flashlight at a branch, with moths and mosquitos buzzing around my hair, until—with much cocking of its head and calculating of angles—one of them finally launches itself upward. The others usually follow suit.

I have to be patient because trying to force guineas to do anything seldom works. They, after all, aren’t nearly as comatose as most birds are after sundown and can easily elude my attempts to catch them. Whether they also can elude predators who can climb trees is the question. But my conclusion is that—since they refuse to go in the coop anymore—they are better off up there than on the porch rail, since coons and possums tend to prowl our porches looking for leftover cat food.

I shouldn’t complain about the guineas, though, since the rest of us often also often ignore signs that things are getting dark until it is almost too late to do anything about that. After our 81-year-old pastor’s health deteriorated rapidly recently, he had to resign the pastorate—which required his driving quite a distance from his home to our church. He actually had retained his membership in another church of our denomination which was only a couple miles from him, in preparation for this eventuality. But, after seven years, it left us feeling a bit bereft, especially since his wife was one of the sorts who mothered all of us.

And, of course, new pastors are very hard to find these days. We were fortunate that another retired one had recently joined our congregation and was willing to fill in for a bit. Actually 83 himself, he is, I suspect, feeling a bit trapped at the moment since he was expecting to be taking it easy about now!

So, we have decisions to make. We had been in the process of considering whether or not to spend the money to replace the increasingly decrepit ramp and porch on the church. Should we move ahead with that now that there was the possibility we wouldn’t be able to keep our doors open?

I was happy, therefore, to run across a YouTube sermon on guidance by Timothy Keller, who recently passed away due to pancreatic cancer. I had considered him my virtual substitute pastor since he was the one I most often watched when we didn’t have church. So, I didn’t appreciate his also deserting me at this inopportune moment but realized that neither he nor my genuine pastor had much choice in the matter!

In this particular YouTube sermon, though, Keller didn’t actually say what I wanted to hear. Instead, he noted that we too often wait around, wanting God to provide us with clear answers and perfect conditions before we move ahead, when grownup children are expected to make their own decisions. Of course, those children do use all that they’ve learned from their parents over the years to help them do that—just as we use all that we’ve learned from God.

But, since He insists on that free will thing, we can’t expect him to provide us with an actual roadmap with all the exits and entrances we should take circled in red! Keller himself revealed that he hadn’t been sure that he should move to New York City and start a church there. As he didn’t have to tell his congregation, that eventually succeeded for him, to the tune of thousands of members and a writing career. But it might just as easily not have. Still, he and his wife did have to sell their old home and trust God to bear them up even if it proved to be the wrong decision.

The point he was trying to make is that God can work with whatever choices we make—even the wrong ones—to cause things to turn out for our best. One example he used was the story of Old Testament Joseph who started out as an egotistical little twerp and never would have become the kind of guy who could lead a kingdom if he hadn’t made some bad choices along the way and had to bear the consequences of them. Bad choices which God used to save his family.

It occurred to me that Moses might be another example since a bad choice he made landed him at the back of beyond for quite a number of years. During that time, he learned to lead animals which are almost as stupid, obstinate, and prone to straying as humans are! That would, of course, come in handy later.

What I didn’t like about Keller’s sermon was all the time and trouble it took for Joseph to reach the happy ending. And now that I thought of it, Moses never even got to go into the promised land he’d been striving towards all those years. Also, most of us would not consider Keller’s death the kind of conclusion he deserved. But, as Hebrews 11 tells us, “None of them received all that God had promised them; for God wanted them to wait and share the even better rewards that were prepared for us.”

As Keller pointed out, we humans generally don’t learn just from being told, but from experience. So there really aren’t any shortcuts. Shortcuts might not be a good idea anyway, since the last time we needed a new pastor we came very close to settling for one who later would abandon his new wife when she contracted Alzheimer’s. Not the kind of man you want leading your church.

The couple who had previously spent much of their lives as missionaries in Haiti proved a much better fit. Nothing much about us rural folk surprised them, anyway, including our insistence that the bees in the church walls not be killed but rather taken away by a beekeeper. And, yes, we did find the right beekeeper, but we had to make the effort of contacting several first.

So, instead of waiting around for a new pastor to drop like manna from heaven—or honey from the walls—we just will have to start the plodding process of contacting substitutes who can fill in until we locate a pastor both humble and self-sufficient enough not to mind taking on a small church.

We found one before when that seemed impossible, after all. Although God doesn’t make our decisions for us, He does illuminate the way as I do for the guineas. Whether or not we make use of that light to actually get somewhere is up to us.