Unexpected Obscurity

The restaurant was busier than we thought it would be for a midweek lunch. The one-woman waitress/hostess/bartender was hussling to and fro while all the customers shared a common understanding that our meal might not be exactly right. In the middle of wrong soups, incorrect portions, and missing salads was our family circus. Our cast took turns performing and alternating roles to entertain and appease our child audience, hoping that we would not draw attention from the other patrons consumed in their own world.

In one such world, in the corner booth, was a solitary girl in her twenties with a glass of white wine and a book. She occasionally scribbled with a pen and turned the pages back and forth. A Bible. She sat there alone during our 45 minute performance savoring her wine and Bible. Three thousand miles from our own home, we came across a solitary woman in an obscure Bavarian tourist town: a fellow believer. Although the odds are far from remarkable or extraordinary, it lingered and confused me.

Ok, God I’ll bite. Where is the Gospel in this vignette of a woman with wine reading the Bible? The obscure “walk-on” or “extra” in my story.

There it is.

The reality is that I am as obscure to her as she is to me. We were that “walk-on” in her story. Although more than that, it is not about my, or her, story. Like every other obscure Christian (pastor, man, mother, or child) who lived within the past 2,000 years, time and history will forget our story. At first this seemed depressing, but then this realization became rather liberating.

The woman’s story, and mine, forms the opaque black curtain in the Drama of Redemption where Christ performs and plays. Living our existance as a “walk-on”, “extra,” or black curtain in God’s Story is not only satisfying and meaningful, it is liberating. It’s far more empowering than writing, starring, and directing a one-man show where I hold the spotlight on myself. God, however, loves me, and her, enough to cast us in His drama. He loves us enough to allow us to participate with Him in His story. He loves us enough to care how well we play these roles. He loves us enough to be glorified through these awkward, obscure, “walk-on”, or black curtain parts; just like the glory He received from a solitary female in a corner booth with a glass of white wine and a Bible.

It made me realize that leaving a staff position in a famous mega-church to becoming an intern in a small Southern church, on the outskirts of an small Southern city, as I prepare for what will surely be an obscure ministry, is a God-glorifying role.

It is glorifying because He called me to fulfill this role. My obscure role is an obscurely ordained one.

And it is against this backdrop, a black curtain that contains all of us obscure Christians, where I pray Christ will be magnified as the hero in the Drama of Redemption. Where Christ eclipses our story and envelopes us in His. I am no longer burdened by carrying the storyline forward, for He has, is, and will carry the story to completion. I, thankfully, am invited to participate in the celebratory outworking of His story in the messiness of life.