One of my summer goals is twenty bags of donated items for the local thrift store. It is easy to take them on Mondays, because I head to the costume room to reorganize. But other times I toss the bags in the back of the car to drop off when I am nearby. Which may or may not be when they are open. Which may or may not lead to me going in. Which may or may not end with me buying things. 

 

The other morning I was browsing in the card section, and noticed a box of  pretty options. Only two dollars. They had a quote by Martin Luther King.

 

"Faith is taking the first step even if you don't see the whole staircase."

 

Isn't that the truth. 

 

The circumstances we find ourselves in seem to have eclipsed not just the upper half of steps, but have cast a shadow on the one we are standing on. In the absence of actual students in the costume room I am sorting through the heaps of supplies. A box of fabric had been minding its own business on the floor when a small leak occurred, and the bright cloth was fusty. Half an hour in the dryer solved that, and the yardage joined their friends in the colorful shelves. I have hopes, if not conclusive evidence, that we will be cutting and sewing soon. It would be possible to give up, succumb to the uncertainty, and leave the room as messy as I left it on the way to spring break. Back then I anticipated the rush of costuming a larger cast than I ever had before, and hustling them onto the stage in a few weeks with a minimum of safety pins. 

 

But that is not what transpired. 

 

I do not recall the name of the piece of lumber that holds the stairs in place. The one that enables you to build it in the first place. But for me the whole structure of decisions reaching into the clouded and unknowable future is solidly attached to my faith in God. 

 

Then Jacob dreamed and behold a staircase was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven. And the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, "I am the Lord God of your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants... behold I am with you and will keep you wherever you go... I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you." Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it." Genesis 28