God's Ways Are Always Open To Us

This blog is based on a sermon by Pastor Teresa Howell-Smith on March 01, 2026

“We find God in the paper thin moments of love and the community that refuses to let us eat alone.”

Sometimes the most profound theological lessons don’t come from commentary or notes. For me, one came in a simple one-line email from a child.

Last weekend, my daughter sent me a note. She said, “Mom, make sure you pick me up from the bus stop. It’s his last day.”

Her bus driver, a man who was 80-years young, was retiring. He wasn’t leaving for a life of leisure — he was stepping down to enter into a new kind of service — to care for his wife who was living with dementia.

That Friday, I witnessed a sacred ritual. As the bus pulled up, every young woman stepped off, stopped, and shook his hand. They handed him cards. They wiped away tears. And as he finally pulled away, he gave one final lingering honk of the horn — a benediction as a sea of young women stood on the curb, waving him into the sunset.

He traveled his road well, leaving a ripple of faithfulness behind him. He knew exactly where he was and how he got there. But not every road ends in a sunset honor.

Recently, I was talking with my children about a case on the news. Two individuals made a series of choices that ignored the wisdom of their parents. Today, two people are deceased, and one is facing a life sentence. And I watched as the judge looked at the survivor and asked a question we all eventually ask: “How did you end up here?”

We ask that question about the headlines in the news every single day. We look at leaders who once held the trust of the public, only to find their names buried in the Epstein Files. We look at CEOs of billion dollar corporations who end up in handcuffs. We look at the news today and we see a war with Iran that none of us wanted, yet here we are standing on the precipice. We ask, “How did we get here?”

There is a subtle but dangerous progression of the soul. There are two paths, and one leads to what we will call The Mess. The path to The Mess happens in three stages: walking, standing and sitting.

First we are walking. It starts small and we think, “It's ok, I’m not fully immersed in the group, I’m just walking alongside them.” We hear the whispers. We hear the justifications. We hear people being told to vote against their own self interests and we see things that feel wrong but we keep pace because we don’t want to be the difficult ones.

Then we are standing. Before long we aren’t just passing through The Mess, we are standing in it. We have invested interest. We don't want to mess up our business connections. We don't want to lose our spot in the children’s play group. We stand there and we remain silent when we witness wrongdoing because we don’t want to mess up our connections.

And finally we are sitting. We move from a stroll to a stand and finally to a seat. Now we are sitting in The Mess and we are fully immersed. A celebrated coach jeopardizes a marriage and a career by having a romantic relationship with and then stalking a colleague. We walk, stand, and sit in The Mess and it becomes our home.

But what happens when we realize that we are already sitting in The Mess? What happens when we realize that our nation and our own lives have taken a turn towards the desert? In the film The Way, the character Tom starts his pilgrimage by walking the wrong way twice. He is a man who was stuck in his own life – standing in his own grief and rigidity. He sets out on a grand spiritual journey, only to realize that he is carrying too much luggage: The heavy weight of old grudges and the need to be in control. As Tom stands in the spot where his son perished, he is paralyzed. We’ve all been there, frozen by a choice that led us to a dead end.

But this is where we have grace. When we take a wrong turn in a car, the GPS doesn’t scream at us, it simply says “recalculating.” God’s grace is the ultimate recalculation. Think of the Road to Emmaus. The disciples were walking the wrong way – away from the promise toward defeat. But Jesus didn’t give them a lecture, he simply walked with them in their wrong direction until they were ready to see the truth.

He met them in their lostness and stayed with them until they reached a table. The prophet Isaiah offers us the alternative to the mess. He speaks to people who are down and out, offering them milk and wine and bread and he’s offering a vision of hope that nourishes the soul.

In The Way, Tom is eventually nourished not by his own strength, but by the strength of the community – of pilgrims he tried to avoid.

We see the same sacrament of the ordinary in the story of a son cooking for his dying father. He slices tomatoes and mozzarella paper thin, drizzling them with golden olive oil. It was a simple meal, but before they ate, the father photographed the plate. It was an act of praise. It was the realization that we don’t need a million dollar corporation or a perfect record to find the divine.

We find God in the paper thin moments of love and the community that refuses to let us eat alone. Our moral choices affect the path we find ourselves upon. If we aren’t careful, we can walk, then stand, then sit our way into a war, a scandal, or a life we don’t even recognize. But whether you are a bus driver finishing a career of quiet faithfulness, or a leader who has realized that they have been sitting in a mess far too long, know this: Our ways are not God’s ways. But God’s ways are always open to us.

We are invited to embark on a pilgrimage of self-examination. To face our demons or to walk toward the light. We surrender to the goodness of the journey, trusting that we are never truly lost. For at the end of every road and the head of every table, God is already there. God is expecting us.

Hallelujah and amen.