Japan or an Ordinary Tuesday?

Have you ever wondered if you missed God’s will?

Before we met, my husband explored the possibility of becoming a missionary in Japan. He studied the language and made Japanese friends. Yet choosing to stay did not initially remove the ambiguity. It simply exchanged visions of Japan for another ordinary Tuesday.

Did he miss God’s will by staying in Texas? What if Japan really was the road he was meant to take?

Few things are more compelling than a missionary story told once the ending is known. Missionaries get biographies — books full of conversion stories and accounts of great Christian figures. Their significance is obvious because we know how the story turns out. By comparison, the literature on waiting in the carpool line remains surprisingly thin.

The problem is that what-ifs live rent-free in our imagination. They never have to pay bills, survive disappointments, navigate conflict, or endure uncertainty. Imagined lives enjoy a remarkable advantage over real ones.

I am profoundly grateful he did not go; otherwise, we would never have met. Our life together is gloriously ordinary: two kids, two loyal dogs, and an opinionated cat.

Surely God’s will would be recognizable by its significance. It would involve sacrifice, risk, and a story worth telling at conferences. Nobody ever stands up and says, “God called me to pay the electric bill, love my wife, and show up for Morning Prayer.”

But grace is found in the life we have, not the one we imagine.

Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, likely expected to marry Mary, practice his trade, raise a family, and continue serving God. There is no indication that he anticipated angels, exile, or the responsibility of raising the Messiah. Then everything changes: Joseph learns that Mary is pregnant. His plan is to quietly end the betrothal, until a celestial being interrupts the situation entirely. The angel’s message did not confirm Joseph’s plans but interrupted them.

How often do Christians approach discernment hoping God will validate the future we have already imagined? We are encouraged to ask, seek, and knock, but often what we really want is certainty. We mistake our preferred outcome for God’s plan and become frustrated when God’s answer takes a different form.

Joseph does not debate the angel’s message or demand additional confirmation. He gets up and does the next thing. When instructed to take Mary as his wife, he does. When told to flee to Egypt, he goes. When told it is safe to return, he returns. His “yes” led him to Bethlehem and a stable birth, to Egypt as a refugee protecting his family from violence, and to Nazareth, where much of his life was spent in obscurity, in the ordinary work of raising Jesus.

His significance is obvious to us because we know the ending. Joseph did not know the ending, nor did my husband.

“Go with God.” Many people are inspired by those three words. They inspired my husband to explore missions, witness to countless individuals.

But the phrase carries more than one meaning. Christians utter those words at departures, disappointments, and gravesides. They are often less a declaration of certainty than a confession of our limits. We say them because there comes a point when we cannot see clearly enough to promise anything more.

Going with God does not remove suffering or uncertainty. In many cases, it is simply the most honest thing Christians can say when they do not know what comes next. Nor was the phrase ever meant to imply that God waits somewhere else — in dramatic departures or spiritually elevated lives. It was never meant to suggest that ordinary life is spiritually second class.

Could “going with God” sometimes look like nothing more than the fiftieth game of I Spy with the kids or a round of fetch with the dog?

Had my husband gone to Japan, his life would have required a different kind of faithfulness. I cannot reduce that reality into a formula about calling or God’s hidden blueprint. Discernment does not eliminate uncertainty. But I no longer believe that God waits only in dramatic departures or spiritually elevated lives.

The irony is that the life my husband once worried might be too ordinary became the joyful life that shaped us. The dishes, the bills, the school pickups, the church attendance, the marriage, the children, the friendships, the small acts of love repeated thousands of times — these were never interruptions to God’s work. They were God’s work.

Perhaps the greater danger is not choosing wrongly but overlooking the life and grace already given. Maturing in Christ may be less about finding the perfect calling than faithfully receiving what has been given.

The imagination is remarkably good at constructing alternate futures and then convincing us they contained the happiness, certainty, or significance we now lack. The roads not taken have one advantage over the roads we travel: they never have to disappoint us.

Grace does not require us to solve the mystery of the roads not taken. God is no less present in the life we received than in the life we imagined.

Sometimes grace arrives as ordinary faithfulness on a Tuesday afternoon.

And sometimes “going with God” turns out to look remarkably like staying.

Author’s Note

Anne Chester is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. The reflections in this essay are offered for educational and informational purposes only and do not constitute psychotherapy, counseling, or professional advice.