A few years back, I worked downtown and our organization’s offices were in a building old and distinctive enough to be on the Historic Register. It was attractive, with a lot of character. At the other end of the block, there was a structure with about zero character and probably among the least attractive buildings in town. A totally nondescript one-story, red-brick square, it had only a couple small windows at one end and one large, ugly metal garage door at the other. No signage beckoned. It was plain, boring, and largely ignored.

I happened to be looking out a window one day when that garage door slowly cranked open. To my surprise, what came creeping out was a Brink’s armored car, sporting the standard equipment for such vehicles—glass built to withstand bullets, a reinforced body that could fend off shrapnel, and bumpers that looked like they could run through concrete. Evidently, large amounts of cash and other valuables were part of the everyday life of that very important little building.

I did not see that coming.

I know a guy who is probably the most congenial grocery store deli employee on the East Coast. He always has a good word for customers and while it’s not his dream job, he does it with unfailing conscientiousness. While he’s slicing your order or making your sub, you’d have no idea of the decades he spent doing missionary work abroad, much of it in a country not especially welcoming to such folks and where a single misstep could land you behind bars.

You would not have seen that coming.

While these are, comparatively, very small examples, buildings and people like that are also gentle reminders to me that as God works out his desires and plans for us and for our world, he frequently does it in ways we never see coming. And, to the disgruntlement of most of us, often in ways we’d never have chosen. As much as I’d like to think that I can sometimes figure out divine intentions, I’m pretty sure a couple bets in today’s booming prediction market would immediately wipe out my life savings. 

This shouldn’t surprise me, because during his time here Jesus majored in the unexpected. Instead of saying what many were hoping for, he spoke of an upside-down kingdom in which the last will be first, the poor and humble will be lifted up, the simple will understand truths that geniuses often don’t see, and the greatest among us will be the ones who serve the others.

He confounded expectations from the get-go, and following him now is very much an off-balance endeavor. While here, Jesus “ate with all the wrong people and kissed lepers,” writes Nadia Bolz-Weber in her book, Accidental Saints. “This God has never made sense.” The Jews were desperately hoping for a messiah-slash-military hero to free them from Roman oppression. What the world got instead was an itinerant rabbi who was eventually arrested, put through a sham trial, tortured, and executed. 

Nobody saw that coming. 

“Not seeing that coming” seems the human affliction, because we want not only to know what the future holds but to control how it comes about. As empowering as that might be, however,  it assumes a God who’s also under our control, and I don’t think any faith is out there advertising one of those—and, if we really thought about it, we wouldn’t be buying anyway.

Researcher and popular author Brene Brown says it this way: “Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.”

I’d like to get better at living life with the adaptability described by psychiatrist and theologian Gerald G. May as “a conscious willingness to fully enter into life just as it is.” That kind of approach, while a lot easier to say than to do, is really the only one that makes sense.

Because there’s still a lot ahead that I’m not going to see coming.