Timing Is God’s Signature

The idea came to me years ago while walking the neighborhood, a time when several people had urged me to write a Bible Study. I would call it “The Divine Signature.” I visualized life like a blank page as a way to say “Yes, LORD” to whatever God brought into my life.

Prof Hendricks told his Bible Study Methods students at Dallas Seminary that only 6% of ideas were any good. Waiting for that thought to register, he then offered the solution.

“Come up with lots of ideas.”

I have lots of ideas.

Since that time, I have had countless ideas, acted on some of them, and most were not such good ideas to begin with.

But one thing I haven’t given up on is the belief that “Timing is God’s signature.” I didn’t read that in a book or hear someone else say it. Yet on countless occasions I have been able to say these words to myself or to someone else in response to a story they told me.

Timing is out of a person’s control. You and I don’t get to decide to make something happen, whether it’s something we had hoped would happen or something we couldn’t have imagined happening.

And when this thing happens, whatever it might be, it marks a moment when a person knows “You are the God who sees me,” (Genesis 16:13). God is the only person who could have known what this moment meant to me, how circumstances converged to make me know “His eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me.”

The Last Time I Saw My Mom

I repeat this story because it is one of the most amazing revelations in a context where I didn’t expect anything but tears and sorrow. The sadness of what proved to be my last goodbye.

But just this week, I was reminded of that day in 1998, that if my mother hadn’t told me this story, she would have gone to her grave without me knowing about this remarkable divine signature. Timing.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

Maya Angelou

When I reflect upon the precision timing that day, I had to be there, where she was instead of where I lived. She was in a nursing home in Menomonee, WI and I lived in Pampa, TX. During Spring Break, I had flown to Minneapolis, rented a car and driven to a town I’d never been to.

With difficulty, I surveyed the surroundings of a semi-private room, stark, yet bright and clean, but still a place that reduced a person to a patient. By then, my mother’s belongings amounted to the contents in her purse.

But I noticed a bulletin board on the wall at the foot of her bed. On it were cards and stickers and a few pictures. Amidst this collage, a handwritten notecard stood out. The words written with a Sharpie, “Victory in Jesus.”

When I asked Mom about this, she lit into her story.

My mother had been a smoker since she was 17 years old, and she frequently cursed the girl who got her started. Well, here she finds herself fifty years later, diagnosed with lung cancer and brain cancer after incalculable failed attempts to quit smoking.

She began by telling me about the young preacher who had been visiting her. I try to imagine this stranger connecting with my mother, caring about her. I’m guessing he was Lutheran. Yes, this was a Lutheran nursing home. But my mother was not Lutheran, nor had she belonged to any church. (That’s another story.)

Somehow their conversation turned on my mother’s need to quit smoking. The next thing, she bounds out of bed, grabs her purse and dumps its contents on the bed, including loose cigarettes, unopened cigarette packages, and matches.

“Take it away,” she said. “Take it all away.”

Perhaps hesitating for a moment, she met his startled expression with “Yes, do it.”

He scooped up the cigarettes.

He turned to my mom and said, “Well, let’s just sing ‘Victory in Jesus.'”

“Why, that’s my favorite hymn!”

And that’s the part of her story that still makes me cry. I never knew she had a favorite hymn.