For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)
The Work Was Ready First
We’re God’s handiwork, made in Christ Jesus to do good works, and God prepared those works in advance for us to do. Grace saved the Ephesians through faith, and Paul is careful that nobody comes away thinking they managed it themselves, because a gift leaves a person nothing to boast about. Not by works, he says, so that no one can boast. After the gift he names the good works, already prepared and waiting. He says who got them ready and when, and then he leaves the Ephesians to walk out into whatever God has lying there for them, without telling them one thing about what it will look like when they get to it.
The rides out of the county airfield last fifteen minutes and cost about what a nice dinner costs. The pilot has flown the same fifteen minutes since April: out over the reservoir, a slow turn at the quarry, back along the tree line to the grass. In cruise he barely touches anything. The airplane flies the heading by itself and he watches the person beside him instead. At noon the air over the cut fields comes up in bumps and the passengers go quiet around the second turn. Today the right seat has a woman of about seventy in it who booked in March and has told everyone she knows since. She has both hands flat on her knees for the first half and doesn’t look out until the quarry.
You look for the work God has for you the way you’d look for a job opening, and it rarely shows up with a title on it. He prepared it in advance, and I’ve found it lying where the day put me, in the seat next to yours, in an hour on a weekday you didn’t choose, in a phone that rings at a bad time, and in the person who says the true thing in a place with too much engine noise for a proper answer.
Coming back along the tree line she says something into the headset and the pilot has to ask her to say it again. “My husband worked on these,” she says. “I’ve been up before, but he always did the flying.”
A Prayer to Remember
Lord, make me slower than I like to be, and put my attention on whoever is next to me before I’ve decided whether it counts. You prepared the work in advance, and a fair amount of it has gone past me on my way out the door.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
