“There’s faith and there’s sleep. We need to pick one please because faith is to be awake and to be awake is for us to think and for us to think is to be alive.” – Twenty One Pilots
I am in the middle of a five-hour drive from the coast of South Carolina to Atlanta. Night has just fallen. I have designs on takeout Chinese in the small town of Allendale, but the storefront is dark. A nearby Hardee’s catches my attention. I walk in, scan the menu, and walk back out.
The possibilities of modern America paralyze me. Fast food chains line every mile of the interstate; new job postings litter my LinkedIn feed; streaming platforms are inundated with new titles every week. I’m plagued by the insidious thought: what if there’s something better? I start books I never finish, scroll through movies on Netflix for an hour and go to bed, drive into Hardee’s parking lots and depart without food. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood and split off into a hundred more, and I, being a prisoner of my century, would like to see them all.
I don’t really need food, but the holidays have awakened a gluttonous beast in the pits of my stomach, and leaving Allendale, it groans for America’s greasiest bastardization of Mexican cuisine.
I drive many miles without any sign of a Taco Bell. I pass through the heart of Augusta. My eye wanders to the neon signs lighting up I-20. Maybe I should just go to Wendy’s. Or McDonald’s? Or the holy trinity of fast chicken, Bojangles’, Zaxby’s, and Chick-Fil-A? (Forgive me, Popeyes). I shift into an exit lane, then change my mind and veer back onto the interstate.
The dark yellow road paralyzes me.
Eventually my hunger wins out, and I turn onto an exit ramp on the outskirts of Augusta. There’s a Zaxby’s two miles to the right that I decide will do. But a few hundred yards off the interstate, a Jersey Mike’s sign, its red and blue a beacon in the dark, catches my eye.
I turn sharply into the parking lot, though I do not know why, for until this moment the possibility had not crossed my mind.
****
The store is new, clean, and almost empty. Speakers blare hits from the 80s on a local FM station with a weak, staticky connection. One employee sits on her phone in the back kitchen and another mans the counter.
I order a chicken cheesesteak dripping with oil. When I’m finished, I pull out my journal, half-comatose, and try to notice my surroundings. I stare dimly at the rack of Miss Vickie’s potato chips. They stare dimly back. I write the following in my journal:
I notice the neat racks of Vickie’s Barbecue Chips…the chipotle mayo mixes with the cooking oil and forms a puddle in the sub wrapper…
Award-winning journalism, I know.
I hear the door open.
A black man in a do-rag swaggers into the store.
I smile out of habit.
He smiles back.
I turn to my journal and continue taking insipid notes, but I have the premonition of being watched. I catch the man in the du-rag staring at me. His eyes dart away, and he bounces up to the counter window. “Let me have, uh…” He orders a sandwich, but I notice him glancing in my direction again.
Why is he looking at me like that?
Fear taps me on the shoulder. I remember my backpack on the chair beside me. He must think I have something worth stealing. I have visions of being jumped in the parking lot.
I pack up my things and hurry outside.
****
Just as I put my car in reverse, I sense someone approaching my door. Of course it’s him.
The man stands between me and the parking lot exit, and gestures for me to roll down my window.
I reluctantly oblige.
“I ain’t trying to bother you, but I noticed you writing in there,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“What were you writing?”
“Uhm…” I’m caught off guard by his question. “Just taking notes on what was going on.”
“Like in the store or your life?”
“My life,” I lie. Lord forgive me, but I’m afraid of what a complete stranger will think if I tell him the truth—that I was taking notes on Miss Vickie’s potato chips and an oil spill in my sub wrapper.
The man begins to backpedal away from my car, as if he can see the suspicion in my eyes. “Listen, I just wanted to say thank you. You’ve inspired me. I used to journal all the time, but lately…” In an oblique spurt of conversation, he tells me about his divorce, his career as a motivational speaker, and how somewhere along the way he lost the discipline of journaling. “I’m not trying to be weird or nothing. But I’m spiritual and when we made eye contact in there and I saw you writing in your journal, it was the reminder I needed.”
His words crack my heart of flint.
“What’s your name?” I ask, reaching my hand out the window.
“Jahani.”
“Matthew.”
Something breaks inside of me beneath the weight of our handshake, his flesh against mine, as if I’ve reentered the land of the living and awake, and regained my faith in God.
“I’m going to go home and start writing in my journal tonight,” Jahani says, backpedaling out of my life as quickly as he arrived.
****
This Substack is not a case of apologetics. It is a call to faith—to explore what it means to be awake to divine possibilities in a world hellbent on anesthetizing itself to sleep. My essays are fragments of life, conversations with friends or strangers, things I notice which some might call banal, everyday affairs but that I find noteworthy.
You might say I’m making mountains out of mole hills, that there is nothing worth writing about in everydayness, but I happen to find mole hills fascinating, particularly with a magnifying glass, and I think it’s extraordinary when a man runs after me in a parking lot to thank me while I concurrently suspect him of criminal motives.
This Substack is worth writing—and reading—if only it serves as reminder that our lives are not a random collection of hours, a meaningless pile of grains falling away into a meaningless abyss, but fragments of an eternal mosaic.
****
I recently read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a short Pulitzer-winning novel that explores the role of God’s providence in the collapse of a bridge in Peru that kills five people. On the first page of the story, the narrator remarks, “It was rather strange that this event should have so impressed the Limeans, for in that country those catastrophes which lawyers shockingly call ‘the acts of God’ were more than usually frequent. Tidal waves were continually washing away cities; earthquakes arrived every week and towers fell upon good men and women all the time.”
The problem in America is not that we doubt God’s plan and cry out: why, God, why? It’s that we only dare ask this in rare, isolated moments—when we hear of another school shooting or see graphic videos from the Middle East, when our loved ones die, or when a bridge collapses in Peru. If we’re awake to the divine possibilities in life, we ought to ask why? far more often than we do.
Why did I pull into a Jersey Mike’s outside Augusta when I considered stopping at a dozen other restaurants, and why did Jahani walk in a few moments after I pulled out my journal? Why did I stop at the Hardee’s in Allendale only to turn around? Why did I not ask Siri where the nearest Taco Bell was on I-20, in which case I would have discovered I only needed to drive one mile farther? What decisions and ripples in the cosmos led to our collision in time?
Like Job, I speak of things I do not understand.
I do not know why I met Jahani, but I believe our meeting was threaded with divine intention, and that by acting in faith, Jahani helped me to notice what I was too fearful to see on my own.
****
CS Lewis once wrote, “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell,” and to this I would add a slight amendment: any man or woman can block out the sun by locking themselves in a dark room, covering their face with a blanket, and shutting their eyes, but they have done nothing to dampen the sun’s luster except in their own life. As humans, we are endowed with the strange and terrible power to banish God from our own hearts without marring His glory in the slightest.
Today is not an ordinary day. There will be no coincidences. But whether we live in darkness or light, whether we see divine patterns or meaningless accidents, hinges on whether we open our eyes.
Matthew this is so good. Thank for awakening my spirit my friend!