As an introvert, I usually get home from work with a desire to hide from the world for a while. I’ve dealt with people all day long, and I’ve had enough. There are even times while still at work when I start to get frustrated with all of the meetings and coffees and casual conversations in the hall and people leaning in to my office to find out if I “have a minute.” (Note that a minute is always at least a quarter hour long.) After all, I have important paperwork to do. Right now, I need to finish drafting the Fall 2018 class schedule, write a description of a proposed program, review and edit the slides for an upcoming advisory board meeting, gather and report a bunch of statistics on our various programs, write up reports from about six recent classroom observations, and several other things that are not immediately coming to mind. And that excludes several email responses I owe people.

All of that is important. It’s all stuff that actually affects people, both students and faculty. And I’m going to shut my door for a portion of the day tomorrow to get some of the most urgent part of it done. But the reality is that when I start resenting the people who are getting in the way of my finishing the paperwork, I’ve lost sight of what’s important. Because God is not about the paperwork. God is about the people.

How do I know that? Well, there are a lot of clues in the Bible, but the most recent sign of it I ran across was in reading Romans 16. That’s the last chapter of the letter, and the end is a beautiful doxology, but the first 15 verses are a bit slow-going: somewhat reminiscent of various passages in the first five books of the Bible such as the genealogies.

In these verses, Paul is talking about a bunch of people. First, he tells the Romans a bit about the person carrying the letter, and then he greets a lot of different people by name. Some of those people are kind of familiar to us from other parts of the New Testament. Prisca and Aquila are the Priscilla and Aquila with whom Paul stayed in Acts. Rufus may be the same as the Rufus mentioned in Mark 15:21, a son of Simon of Cyrene who helped carry the cross. But most of these names are not familiar to us; many don’t appear anywhere else in the Bible.

So what’s the point of having all of these names listed? For that matter, what’s the point of all of those long lists of names in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy? Why should we take the time to read them? Why are they part of the inspired word of God?

While I am sure there are reasons I don’t understand yet, I would offer this one: they demonstrate to us that God cares about the people. Every one of those names represents someone who matters to God as an individual. If we can take nothing else from such passages, we can take comfort from knowing that the God who cared enough to have that person listed for posterity cares just as much about us as about the people whose names appear in the Bible.

And, I think, we should take those lists as a reminder that the people matter. Yes, it is important that I get the Fall 18 schedule drafted by the deadline and that I do a good job of it. That will impact 800 or so people next fall. But I can’t forget that it is also important that I take the time required to stop and listen to whatever individual is asking for my attention, because that person is important to God and must, therefore, matter greatly to me.

I have a very clear memory of my reaction to a church service during my second year of college that made me very unhappy and probably solidified my decision to change churches. I was already frustrated with the new college minister and his wife (more on the subject of God’s attitudes toward women another day), but the final straw was a sermon by the new pastor. He announced the passage the sermon was on and made his first point. I proceeded (in my arrogance) to jot down a pretty full outline of the sermon and then got more and more annoyed as he preached the exact sermon that I had just outlined.

In my next letter home, I complained to my parents at some length with the theme that there’s no point in wasting my time listening to a sermon when I obviously already knew everything the pastor was going to say. My very wise mother made the point that it was a good thing that the pastor was preaching the passage accurately and that being reminded of things could be good. I left that church soon after despite her advice, but I have later tried to remember that sometimes we do need repetition, whether we like it or not.

And, really, we don’t always dislike it. I, personally, love rereading favorite books. I used to read Pride and Prejudice once a year. Other favorites I would read whenever I got the chance. I remember staying up all night rereading The Lord of the Rings as a teenager because my family was spending a weekend at the house of friends who owned the trilogy when I didn’t yet.

We seem to be born with a love for repetition. Infants and toddlers will do the same thing over and over as they figure out the world. Rereading is a must for them. I remember sitting with my first son on my lap reading the same book over and over. He used to grab the book when I finished, turn it over, and say “‘gain” most emphatically. His record was 10 times in a row for the same book.

Children want and need the repetition as part of their learning process. As adults we often become less tolerant of repetition, especially of things we know, or things we think we know. Nonetheless, repetition is still something we need. As we read the Bible passage again, we often glean new insights, whether because we read more carefully, because God helped us reach an understanding that we haven’t had before, or because our experience has made something more relevant.

I’m currently in Deuteronomy for my Old Testament reading. Of course, the book is a repetition as Moses tells the Israelites who are about to enter the Promised Land about everything that has happened as he led them out of Egypt to Mount Sinai and then to Canaan and then out into wilderness for 40 years of wandering and finally back to the Jordan River.

Why? Why include this book that is largely a rehash of Exodus and Numbers?

I think there are a number of reasons, but I’m going to offer two for consideration. First, as I reread the opening chapters this time, I was struck at how much the voice and personality of Moses come through in this book in a way that they don’t in the previous books. Moses tells it like it is from his perspective. It’s kind of entertaining, and I think it’s a reminder that God made us all as unique people with personalities. He’s not interested in a bunch of robots. Walking closely with God won’t erase who we are: it will make us the best version of ourselves.

The other reason I want to offer is that Deuteronomy is a reminder that we do need to hear it again. The Israelites knew all of the stories. Most of them had been children or not yet born during the initial exodus, but they had heard the stories. However, they need this formal big reminder of all that God had done for them (and all that they had done wrong) as they prepared to take the next big step and to lose the only leader they had known during this forty years. This should serve as a reminder to us that we need to re-hear truth, that we need to re-visit the story of God’s work in our lives. We should never get tired of hearing the gospel, because it is the center of what God has done for us.

So how am I doing these days? Better. I won’t claim that I never get bored with a sermon. And I certainly don’t prefer sermons where the pastor tells you what he’s going to tell you, then he tells it, then he tells you what it is that he just told you. However, I am doing much better about having an open mind and trying to hear the truths that I didn’t get before or that I have forgotten or that I just need to be more focused on.

So there was a lot of moving going on at the end of September in my world. We helped move one of my sons and his wife from St. Louis to Baltimore. The same weekend, a family from our small group moved from here in Normal to Las Vegas (now there’s a life change). One thing I know for sure about both of those trips is that there was a lot of praying going on. The other thing I know for sure is that things didn’t go smoothly.

Our move was a do-it-yourself all the way: not even a rental truck, though there was a rental SUV involved as well as the purchase of a few good packing boxes. The kids had been living on a shoe string for years and had saved for new and better furniture after the move, so they donated what was worth donating and threw the rest away and managed to squeeze their lives and the cat into their two cars and the SUV. This, of course, took quite a bit longer than anticipated. The really interesting part came when the transmission on one of the cars started having issues while we were still in Indiana. So we end up driving the long way to the Motel 6 in Richmond, IN (which takes cats and is very clean, if a bit Spartan).

Of course, the next day is Sunday, so the closest rental place that is open is in Dayton, OH. The kids get the car and drop off the other at the Ford dealership. By the way, that dealership was great. If you ever need one in the vicinity of Richmond, they were wonderful. We get on the road around 11 am, knowing that we have to reach Baltimore that night because my son starts his job there on Monday morning. That day was less eventful, but my daughter-in-law had never driven in mountains before, and there are certainly some crazy drivers on I-70, so we were all pretty stressed but very grateful to reach the hotel safely that night.

The story continues with an “Available Now” apartment that wouldn’t be ready until at least the next Sunday. You may remember that there’s a cat and a bunch of stuff involved, and the kids now have to drive back to Richmond to get the car and drop off the rental over the weekend.

By all accounts the other move happening was even more harrowing. Sick kids, a snowstorm, a car stuck in the snow at one point. Sounded like quite the adventure that I would want to avoid.

So here’s the question: where were all those travel mercies that were being prayed about?

There are some practical answers to that question. My kids are safely in an apartment (a different apartment than originally planned). The cat survived their absence and didn’t wreck the new place and is beginning to settle in. The transmission was still under warranty, so the only extra cost was the rental car, and the kids say they’re currently under budget for the move plus furniture. And the other family is safely in their new home as well.

But still the angst and exhaustion and pain and frustration are real.

I don’t have the all of the answers, but I think there are a few. The first is the basic flaw in believing that Christians lives will or should be smooth. “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” John 16:33 (ESV). This is partly about tribulation because we are Christ followers, but it’s also just about trouble because the world is imperfect in its current broken state. “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” Proverbs 27:17 (ESV). A lot of the issues we faced had to do with people being imperfect. Iron sharpens iron in a way that would be painful if the objects could feel. It is sometimes painful for us. God cares about our character, not our comfort; our holiness, not our happiness. So he’s not going to prevent things that bring pain but may bring growth with it.

However, I really appreciate all of the people praying for those travel mercies. Can you imagine if the transmission had just quit on the highway instead of allowing us to limp on to a dealer? Or if any of those scary moments that felt like near accidents had turned into real accidents? Keep praying, folks. We don’t always get to know all of the good that our prayers do, but we do know that the God we pray to is good and cares for us.