To ward off the bitter cold, Ida and Corrine built a fire in the school's wood-burning stove. "They would not be rescued for nearly twenty-four hours...but from that point onward, as Mrs. Hausmann would say, they were ‘in the bosom of the Lord.’"

Corrine never forgot that experience. When she grew up and became a mother herself, she would always say to her children: "Well, then! Don't believe if you choose not to. I know what happened and I know what truth is and God's purpose is not altered whether such as you believe or not.’ And we'd laugh, recalls her son Judd, protesting, ‘Oh Mom.’"

No degree of disbelief, however, would ever dissuade Corrine from the certainty that she and her mother had been saved, miraculously, by God's divine Providence. Her son remembers: "Mom was stubborn, and eloquent. She said, in a hurt, dignified tone, that her mother was a country woman of the old days, German-born Lutheran and brought to America at the age of less than a year; she'd always been a common sense Lutheran, not given to flights of religious fancy; when such people are confronted by truth they know to be true they never change their minds, ever. Mom said you have to experience certain things to know certain things."

Recently, I read a published exchange of letters between a young woman and an older man. At one point the man writes to his friend that something remarkable and unexpected had happened to him. He had no explanation for the event; "Perhaps," he wrote to his friend, "it was a coincidence." He could not attribute it to any mysterious plan of a higher power, because, of course, he did not believe in God. His only context for the surprises that entered his life was chance, fate or mere coincidence.

Missing from his life is any sense of a divine context for these surprises. He is left to say only that he is surprised by things that go bump, unexpectedly, in the daylight, as well as things that go bump in the night. The context for the surprises and the joys that come to him are limited to his human understanding, and rise no higher than what he can see, measure, or feel; he is cut off from the possibility of a God who works within our lives, who knows us, and whose love is so profound that it grants to us surprises that never cease to amaze us.

Novels and other works of art with which we are blessed, offer us an avenue into a sense of the transcendence. Flannery O'Connor, for example, writing about what she calls "serious fiction," observed that any story "that can be entirely explained by the adequate motivation of the characters or by a believable imitation of life, or by a proper theology, will not be large enough." The writer does have to be concerned with facticity, but only she insists that the fiction writer must be always aware of ‘the meaning of (the) story that does not begin at a depth where these things have been exhausted. The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when (s)he finishes, there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula....."

Gary Dorrien, a professor of religion at Kalamazoo College, has written a new book on Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian who challenged modern liberal thinkers to see God as a transcendent presence in the world, rather than as the center of a logical system of philosophical thought. Dorrien writes that Karl Barth "lifted up to modern Christianity the ineffable mystery, hiddenness, ever-graciousness and glory of the divine source of revelation."

The context for the mystery of God for the Christian believer is that fragile, but sturdy institution we call the church, or if you belong to another tradition, the synagogue, or perhaps, the mosque. These are the communities that sustain the tradition where, both alone and with others, we recall that God's surprises are gifts to those who are willing to be open to their presence.

A movie made in Germany a few years back offers an example of the context and the surprising gifts that God grants to us, gifts that we could not have expected, and that come to us in ways we could not have planned. The movie, directed by Frank Beyer, is Nicholaikirche, based on a novel by Ernest Loest. In the story, drawn from actual events, the people of East Germany are beginning their final move toward an uncertain, unknown future, a future that will, to everyone's surprise, bring the Cold War to a dramatic conclusion. Nicholaikirche—St. Nicholas' church—is a Lutheran church and for the believer it provides a religious context for God's institutional structure.

As East German citizens grow restless under the oppression of communism, they look for a place in which they will be able to voice their longing for freedom. All public buildings are closed to them. But the churches, like Nicholaikirche, are open and they begin to go there for Monday night prayer meetings.

Discussions, prayers and, at the end of the evening meeting, the lighting of candles become a regular occurrence. Many of those who come to these meetings are Christians; but others are not. The non-believers come because it gives them a context in which to congregate. The crowds grow larger; communist officials become alarmed. They are worried that these church prayer meetings could get out of hand and become a threat to the state. Still, the prayer meetings continue and the crowds, with their lighted candles, spill out of the church and march each Monday night.

Finally, on October 8, 1989, the Leipzig secret police, the Stasis, decide to organize themselves into an armed force prepared to use against the marchers the Chinese Solution, a reference to the decision by communist authorities in China to shoot and kill peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. The crowd on this particular Monday night left the church and marched toward the City Hall where armed troops were ready to greet them with violence. The Stasis commander, however, needs final approval to open fire on the marchers from either Moscow or Berlin. He waits for a telephone call. It does not come; party leaders do not want to risk killing so many of their own people, especially those whose march began in a church meeting. He does not receive the order to attack. Instead, the troops are ordered inside the city hall and all the lights are turned off. The crowd reaches the city hall, places its candles on the building steps and there they stand silently. The danger is over; the marchers have won. The Stasis commander stares out of the window at the crowd below and mutters: "We planned everything. We were prepared for everything, except for candles and prayers."

In that pivotal moment, history shifted. The Cold War was ending. In the context of church, a people, and a tradition, God was at work. Such moments of change come as joyous surprises; moments we can not anticipate nor fully understand. But looking back, we can see how candles and prayers and not guns and violence worked to bring freedom to eastern Europe.

God surprises us with the gift of his mysterious presence, not just by answering our prayers, or sustaining us when we are fearful, but by the marvelous gift of his love poured out upon us when we least expect it. If we come to see life as filled with such moments of unexpected surprises, we can lose our sense of anxiety because to move through life expecting God's love in unexpected ways is to live in faith—to operate within a context of surprises.

In that novel by Joyce Carol Oates that I mentioned earlier, Corrine Mulvaney is certain that God saved her and her mother by sending to them fireflies to bring them out of a blizzard, despite the obvious fact that fireflies don't come out in the middle of winter. Corrine knew the truth of what she had experienced and she would, for the rest of her life, live by that truth. This is the context for Corrine Mulvaney's belief that, as the novel describes it, "Like an explorer to Antarctica, or to the moon—once you stepped foot in such a place, you'd never doubt it existed. It's like giving birth—that, just once, you'd never doubt. ‘If you've done it, you know; if not, you don’t.’ Mom would smile beatifically, and fix her glowing blue gaze on us one by one until we'd begin to squirm. Even Dad."

Among modern theologians, Joseph Settler has been especially sensitive to understanding how it is that God surprises us with the gift of his presence. He refers to these as moments of God's grace and urges us to remember again how the Gospels so often spoke of the unexpectedness of the "bestowals of grace." As Settler puts it, we should recall from the New Testament how such phrases as "And suddenly...", "On the way he met...", "Now it happened that...", and "There stood before him a man...." All phrases that remind us of the joyous unexpectedness of God's presence in our life.

Do fireflies come out in winter? They do if you see them. And does God surprise us out of the depths of an ineffable mystery, granting us that precious awareness that we are loved? Yes, for which we remain eternally grateful.

Lydia Talbot: Jim, in your earlier message on the context for surprises, what convinces you that these moments are gifts of grace from God rather than sheer coincidence as the cynic would see it?

James Wall: What convinces me is the faith tradition out of which I function. And, I don't attribute everything to God's will, but I know when the good things of life happen to me, God is at work. I know when the bad things of life happen to me, that God is standing with me, sustaining me in those moments. You know, this idea of understanding the context of surprises is a great evangelical tool in the sense that if you get people to understand that what has happened to them has a purpose, has a background, has a transcendent element to it.

Talbot: Now, let's take a closer look at those elements that have shaped your own religious sensibility from a young boy growing up in Monroe, Georgia, to the sports editor—"tough minded" as your editor Ralph McGill once called you—of the Atlanta Constitution, to an ordained minister and editor of the Christian Century magazine. What difference has that faith perspective really meant in how you view the world?

Wall: I think the difference it has made for me, Lydia, is that life can be tough. Everybody who watches us knows that. There are moments of great darkness. There are moments of great depression. If you don't emotionally feel depressed, you know things are not going well for you. In that moment, you feel sustained by that love that God bestows upon us. The love of God is unbelievable because it is undeserved, unexpected, and certainly unearned.

Talbot: As editor of the Christian Century magazine, Jim, I know one news operation's person once called you, "the one who could interpret and clarify the complexities of issues in our world." And, we thank you for that. As editor of the Christian Century magazine, thanks for being with us.