Once upon a time, in a land 75 miles away, there was a young man who walked down the aisle and sat on the third pew from the front. He really wasn’t a young man at 17 years old, he was just a skinny kid in a suit that his mother had made for him at her sewing machine. But he was trying to make grown-up decisions about his life and the third row seemed like a place to start.

He had always been a backrow kind of kid. Every teenager sat on the back row. On the back row you could distance yourself from the rest of the room. It was easier to cut up, pass notes, doodle on the bulletin, and make fun of the lady with the funny hat.

At first, he took his usual place in the back, but for some crazy unexplainable reason, right before the service started, he had this urge. He thought maybe he had to go to the bathroom. No. That wasn’t it. He wondered if he had forgotten his dollar bill for the offering plate. Nope.

Then, out of nowhere he thought to himself, “Ya know, I’m gonna pay attention today.”

And with that, he got up and walked down to the third row.

A lot of years have gone by since that day. The river of time has moved on. But the man who was the boy can still look back and point to that day that he sat in the third pew as the day that might have changed the trajectory of his life.

It’s hard to say that any one event in life has that much power. No singular act or thought holds within itself all the mojo necessary to make a kid move to the third pew. It’s usually the accumulation of a lot of little events and experiences. The influence of a mentor. Something he read on a cereal box. A crazy dream.

But whatever it was, he felt the urge that day to pay attention.

You might not know this, but when a boy starts paying attention, life can get really complicated. He starts trying to figure out what he’s supposed to do with his life. He has more questions than there are answers. “Pay attention to what?” he wants to know.

I’ve gotta speed up this story if I’m ever gonna get to the point.

So, all of this “paying attention” led to a lot of decisions over the years. It affected where he went to school. It drew him into a vocation which he never felt quite fit him. Turmoil visited often. Moving out of state didn’t make it go away. When his kids asked for advice, he felt the weight of being sloppy about figuring out his own life.

Then one day, his wife died. He found it extremely hard to even want to pay attention. “What do You want from me?” he asked. But there was no response. No urge. No sign telling him what to do.

Even so, little by little, he began to listen again. He thought about the One who directs his steps. The One who sees a side of life that he cannot see. The One who knows things that he cannot begin to fathom. The One who mysteriously orchestrates the tiniest of events, which to the dull of heart appear as mere circumstance, but to the one paying attention they are nothing short of a divine appointment.

In the course of time, he noticed that he had a lot of company on this journey. Others trying to pay attention. People eager for some sense of purpose. The brokenhearted ready to make sense of life again.

And he kept trying to tell them all to hang in there. He’d say things like, “Just because life took a hard turn that you didn’t see coming doesn’t mean that your world is falling apart.” Or he especially liked this one, “Not every failed expectation is a loss. It could be a divine redirection.”

But advice-giving is dangerous business. Not that we shouldn’t share our experiences and what we learn from them. It’s just that one man’s solution is another man’s quandary. What makes sense to one is the very thing that causes a dilemma for another.

One day this kid who grew up into a man was talking to a friend of his. This friend had also lost his wife, though only a short time ago. They had talked many times. They had many shared experiences in life. He was doing his best to help his friend walk the road he himself had walked. Yet every word, every piece of advice felt painfully inadequate.

They were talking about “purpose” when his friend said to him, “I don’t need THE purpose. I just need a purpose to find some pleasure in life again.”

Our fella thought about that. He poured over all the times he had searched for the right thing to do with his life. He thought about all the wrestling matches he endured to find some way of making his life fit into the Big Plan. All the worry. All the angst. All the self-doubt about his decisions.

He thought about that boy who sat in the third pew that day and wondered what happened. Where did his life go? Did he ever find his purpose? THE purpose meant for him.

Out of nowhere it occurred to him that his whole life had been about the search. Whenever he settled on something and said to himself that “this must be it,” IT changed. The job changed. The town changed. The house changed. The marriage changed. The church changed.

The one thing that was consistent was the search.

“Maybe that’s the point of it all,” he thought. That no matter where life takes a man, keep the search alive. Keep asking. Keep seeking. Keep knocking. Don’t ever stop paying attention to the One who knows where this train is headed.

I know this fella pretty well, and I can tell you that even though his life has been nothing but extremely ordinary; working an ordinary job, paying ordinary bills, mowing a very ordinary lawn; he has learned that if he pays attention, some very extraordinary things will come into view.

Purpose is not found in the handwriting on the wall as much as it is found in the silent nudge. And if a man is looking for the big sign in the sky, he might miss the quiet bump in his soul.

Paying attention might be enough. He asks himself, “What nudge, what whisper, what seemingly inconsequential moment will I notice today?” Maybe this alone is enough reason to get out of bed, just to see what He might do.

Opportunity masquerades as happenstance. A fella might buy a book. He might have coffee with a friend. He might talk to a complete stranger in the paint aisle at the hardware store. That quiet bump can find a man almost anywhere.

The boy who moved down to the third pew could never had known this back then…but at near 70, he’s ready to pay attention now more than ever.