Somewhere today a man is telling people that he used to be an atheist, and that it was quantum physics — of all things — that started him walking toward Jesus. Not a revival meeting. Not a tract on a windshield. Equations. The strange, unsettling behavior of very small things.
I love that, and I'll tell you why. It is one more reminder that God is not limited to the doorways we would have chosen for Him.
We keep guessing wrong about the door
If you asked most of us to sketch out how a committed skeptic comes to Christ, we'd draw the same picture. A crisis. A funeral. A moment of desperation when the arguments run out. And sometimes that is exactly how it goes. But not always, and maybe not even usually.
Sometimes it isn't desperation at all. Sometimes it is wonder. A person looks hard at the world — really looks, with a trained eye and an honest mind — and the world will not sit still and behave like a machine. There's more there than the materials can account for. And a question starts up in the chest that no amount of data will quiet: why is there anything at all, and why is it so beautifully, maddeningly strange?
David wrote about that long before anyone had a laboratory. "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge" (Psalm 19:1-2). Creation has been talking the whole time. Some people just happen to work in a field where they have to listen closely for a living.
Not far from any one of us
Paul stood in Athens surrounded by people who prided themselves on thinking, and he did not scold them for it. He told them something astonishing instead:
"From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.'" (Acts 17:26-28)
Read that slowly. The seeking is not an accident. God arranged the times and the places and the circumstances so that people would reach out and find Him. Which means the atheist physicist bent over his work, half-irritated by a result that won't resolve, is not outside the plan. He is inside it, and he doesn't know it yet.
And He is not far. That's the line that stays with me. Not far from the skeptic. Not far from the person who stopped praying years ago. Not far from the kid in the back row who comes because his grandmother drives him. The Holy Spirit is already at work in people long before anyone gets around to telling them so.
What this asks of us
Two things, I think.
First, stop sorting people into likely and unlikely. We do it quietly and constantly. We decide who's reachable. We write off the brother-in-law with the hard questions and pour our hope into the softer prospect. But God is not working from our list. He reaches people through a microscope, through a kindness at work, through a song in a grocery store, through a conversation that seemed to go nowhere. Your job is not to predict the door. Your job is to keep being a person who is easy to ask.
Second, be unafraid of the questions. Faith is not nervous around real inquiry. When somebody brings you something you can't answer, "I don't know — let's find out" is a perfectly faithful sentence. The Spirit of truth is not threatened by a hard question, and neither should we be.
Here is where I'd point you practically: bring those names to prayer. We gather to pray on Tuesday, October 13 at 11am, and I'd love for the room to be full of specific people — named, prayed over, believed for. Not vague goodwill. Names. We've seen God answer prayers like that, and we expect Him to keep doing it.
And if you've been praying for someone a long time with nothing visible to show for it, hear me: that is not failure, and it is not evidence that God isn't listening. You are praying for a person He arranged the times and the boundaries for. He is nearer to them right now than you are.
Jesus met a scholar named Nicodemus at night, when the man's questions were too awkward for daylight, and He didn't send him away. He still doesn't. Whatever road brings a person to Him — grief or wonder or sheer stubborn curiosity about why the universe behaves the way it does — the One waiting at the end of it has His arms open.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.