He Saw What God Was Doing

There is a peculiar tension in every human life.

We spend much of our existence attempting to understand who we are while God is often occupied with forming who we are becoming. The two realities rarely move at the same pace.

Most people can recognize talent. Many can identify success. A few can discern potential. It is far rarer, however, to encounter someone capable of recognizing purpose while it remains concealed beneath struggle, contradiction, and uncertainty.

Such people possess a different way of seeing. They understand that a person's present condition is not necessarily an accurate measure of their future contribution. They recognize that some of God's most significant work occurs beneath the surface, long before there is evidence visible to the rest of us.

My father was one of those people.

It has been a month since Rev. Rich Rienstra passed from this life into the next. During that time I have found myself reflecting less on the positions he held, the organizations he served, or even the accomplishments that marked his career. Instead, I keep returning to a quality that shaped nearly every aspect of his life: his ability to distinguish between who a person was at a particular moment and who they were in the process of becoming.

That distinction changed countless lives.

It certainly changed the trajectory of mine.

Providence has a peculiar habit of disguising itself as ordinary life. Rarely do we recognize its significance while we are living through it. The events that eventually shape us most profoundly often appear unremarkable at the time, revealing their meaning only years later when enough distance has accumulated for us to see the larger pattern.

My adoption into the Rienstra family was one of those events.

As a child, I understood it simply as the story of how I came to belong to a family. What I could not have understood was that God had entrusted me to a man whose life had been shaped by a deep commitment to reconciliation and an abiding belief in the dignity and potential of others. Long before I recognized what God might be doing, my father had already developed the capacity to look beyond appearances and trust that a person's story was larger than the chapter currently being written.

There were periods in my life when many of the conclusions people reached about me appeared entirely reasonable. They were based upon observable facts, and observable facts are often persuasive. Yet facts alone rarely tell the whole story.

One of the enduring limitations of human perception is our tendency to mistake proximity for understanding. We encounter a season in someone's life and assume we have encountered the whole person. We observe a failure and begin treating it as an identity. We see consequences and quietly conclude that the story has already been written.

My father possessed a remarkable resistance to that kind of thinking.

Not because he ignored reality. Quite the opposite. He understood the realities of failure, suffering, disappointment, and human frailty better than most people I have known. What distinguished him was his conviction that none of those realities, by themselves, were sufficient to explain a person's life.

Over time I came to understand that this perspective was rooted in his understanding of reconciliation.

Reconciliation, as my father lived it, extended well beyond the restoration of broken relationships. It shaped the way he interpreted people. He approached human beings with the assumption that God's work in their lives was often unfinished and frequently hidden. That assumption created room for possibilities others overlooked.

The biblical narrative reflects this pattern repeatedly. Joseph's leadership emerged through betrayal and imprisonment. Moses spent decades in obscurity before confronting Pharaoh. David was anointed long before he occupied a throne. The Apostle Paul carried his future calling within him while still traveling in the opposite direction.

Scripture consistently reminds us that formation and revelation are not the same thing. One may be taking place long before the other becomes visible.

My father understood that.

He understood that purpose often develops quietly. That growth is rarely linear. That adversity, while painful, is not always without purpose. Most importantly, he understood that God remains at work in places where many people have stopped looking.

As I have reflected over the past month, I have become increasingly convinced that this kind of vision is one of the great responsibilities of discipleship.

To see people only as they are requires very little faith.

To see them as they may become requires a willingness to believe that God is not finished with them yet.

Perhaps that is why reconciliation sits so close to the heart of the Gospel. It refuses to reduce a human being to a single failure, a single season, or a single moment. It leaves room for growth, room for restoration, and room for God to continue His work.

As I have reflected on my father's life over the past month, another thought has begun to take shape.

Perhaps some people are called to build things.

Others are called to lead them.

And a rare few are called to prepare people for work they themselves may never see completed.

There is a quiet confidence required for that. The confidence to believe that the work ultimately belongs to God, not to us. My father carried that confidence. He invested in people generously, often without any need to control the outcome or determine how the story would end.

Looking back, I think that may be one of the most overlooked aspects of his life. He understood that faithfulness and ownership are not the same thing. The work was never his to possess. It was his to steward.

And because of that, he was able to spend his life preparing others for responsibilities he knew he might never personally see fulfilled.

A few nights ago, I had a dream about my father.

It was late afternoon at a baseball field.

I was standing along the fence looking out across the diamond when he walked up beside me.

We stood there quietly for a moment both enjoying the view before us...

Then, he turned to me, smiled and confidently stated, "Let's go."

And just like that he was gone.

I could not have asked for a better encounter one month later than that. He's right on time.

There's still work to do.

Let's go...

Take time to reflect today, It'll do you some good.

-Troy Rienstra