Sometimes an impossible “odd event” fortifies the future—recalled during dark days to sustain us. Remember.
• Anthony Hopkins found the rare novel he’d searched all over London for—discarded on a park bench. The author’s own stolen, annotated copy.
• Viktor Frankl, agonizing over whether to flee the Nazis, found a marble fragment from a razed synagogue: “Honor thy father and mother.” He stayed.
• George Müller had no food for 300 orphans. He prayed. A baker knocked at dawn. A milkman’s cart broke down at the orphanage gate.
Things can happen that make a life-difference.
At 4 AM, just hours ago, I remembered one such moment. I was 29.
Someone knocked at my apartment door.
Someone who couldn’t know I existed—someone “famous” I’d never heard of—showed up at my ratty little apartment, in a city of a million people, 900 miles from where I’d lived only weeks earlier. I didn’t know a soul in the new city. There wasn’t a reason in the world that this man would show up at my door.
I had just walked away from a stellar corporate career. Patents. Fast climbing. But, I flew to Chicago, shook hands with the Founder’s grandson, and retired at 27. I burned my résumé in a Weber grill—so I couldn’t plead insanity later and crawl back.
70% pay cut. No home, after owning homes in Chicago and Nashville. Almost no one knew I had done this. Even fewer cared.
The “Isaac” I’d been building since age 10—Harvard Business Review, WSJ, Boardroom Reports, Britannica—was on the altar.
Then he knocked.
DeVern Fromke (1923–2016). Fedora. Beat-up leather briefcase. Dressed like a CIA agent, straight out of the 1940s. Over twice my age. He had navigated to the back of my complex to find my green door.
DeVern, unbeknownst to me, had spent a half-century dismantling me-centered religion—arguing the universe exists not as a stage for human performance and for our “salvation,” per se. The world exists, we exist, for God’s satisfaction and glory.
DeVern had walked alongside T. Austin-Sparks and built on the work and relationships of Watchman Nee, and many more. He’d carried that briefcase to Brazil, New Zealand, Japan, Europe, traveling and speaking side-by-side with Austin-Sparks and other passionate world changers. He was not “the warm-up band.“ He was the real deal.
“The Ultimate Intention,” “Unto Full Stature” and “Life’s Ultimate Privilege”—step into the “mind-blowingly glorious” purpose of God.
Why was this stranger at my ghetto apartment door? It made no sense. It didn’t yet, anyway.
On his Cloverdale farm, DeVern and Juanita, roofing his house, deep conversation—all a reminder. God can do impossible things. He has plans.
If we position ourselves properly, He will confirm he believes in us. He has plans for us, in ways we couldn’t have orchestrated.
Knowing God is involved-chases the dark days away.
At 4 AM, I decided it wasn’t an accident that he showed up at my door in a way that matters to me now, so many years later.
Answer the door.
BeHisChange.com
