Saturday afternoon my wife and I were traveling north in Virginia, hoping to be home in Michigan on Sunday, when the engine in our car began to act strangely. It stalled while idling at stop lights, and on the highway from time to time it shuddered and lost power. We had the sinking feeling that comes when you are far from home and no longer trust your car to make it all the way. I kept praying within myself, “I am afraid, God, but I trust in you.” We stopped for the night in Winchester, the red dot at the top of the Virginia map.
Once we settled in at our motel room, we had a decision to make: continue north Sunday, or wait until Monday morning and have the car checked out. My first thought was to go on the next day and trust that since the car had come this far it would make it all the way home. But I was uneasy about it. So in my mind I began seeking God’s direction for what we should do about our travel. My wife was afraid to go farther on Sunday. She didn’t want to get stranded in a stalled car on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I agreed and inwardly set aside my first impulse to keep going. I have learned to trust my wife’s wisdom. I also sensed in her words God’s answer to my prayer for guidance. The next morning a scripture listed for that day confirmed the decision to stay put: “The wise are cautious and avoid danger; fools plunge ahead with reckless confidence.” (Proverbs 14:16) Our car was repaired Monday morning, and we arrived home in the evening, a day later than planned.
In her book Quaker Strongholds, Caroline Stephen uses the landscape of England to illustrate the guidance of God in our daily lives:
That individual and immediate guidance, in which we recognize that ‘the finger of God is come upon us,’ seems to come in, as it were, to complete and perfect the work rough-hewn by morality and conscience. We may liken the laws of our country to the cliffs of our island, over which we rarely feel ourselves in any danger of falling; the moral standard of our social circle to the beaten highway road which we can hardly miss. Our own conscience would then be represented by a fence, by which some parts of of the country are enclosed for each one, the road itself at times barred or narrowed. And that Divine guidance of which I am speaking could be typified only by the pressure of a hand upon ours, leading us gently to step to the right or the left, to pause or go forward, in a manner intended for and understood by ourselves alone.
Later she notes the times when divine guidance may lead us to transgress the boundaries of imperfect human laws and customs. But in the main her picture holds well of what God’s leading may feel like in the press of daily decisions. ‘The pressure of a hand upon ours, leading us gently to step to the right or to the left, to pause or go forward.’ It takes patience and the practice of stillness to learn actually to feel that hand. I felt it in the decision to stay in Winchester and wait.
