Acts 16 may not be anyone’s favorite Bible passage. It’s a rather obscure story; some of us may not even recall hearing it before! But I think it has an important place in the Bible, even so. Because it just may be that what Paul and his friends went through at Troas would not be so strange to you. Troas is what you find at the end of your road, a grimy seaport at the edge of the known world. Since leaving Ephesus, Paul and company have hit one roadblock after another. After 250 miles of hard going, their money spent, their feet blistered, they end up at this apparent dead end. It is night, and each of them goes to bed with the Troas feeling that many of us have at one time or another experienced: well, what am I supposed to do now?

I expect that nearly everyone who struggles to walk with God has experienced the closed door, the frustrated goal, perhaps the interrupted career path. At one time, we were plugging along great, and it seemed God was smiling on our progress, our aspirations, our relationships. Then a door closed (or maybe got slammed?) in our face. We paused, took stock, and discovered that we’d ended up at an unplanned destination in life, not even a destination, a way station, a Troas, a place of long nights during which you wonder: OK, God. Did you bring me this far just to drop me off?

But you might be interested to know that the Holy Spirit has access to folks in Troas. A vision, perhaps a dream – that’s how the Spirit came to Paul. Sometime during the night, he got an Instant Message - “an IM from the great I Am.” Paul saw a man he understood to be Macedonian, asking him to come over and help his people. Paul greets the sunrise with a new mission. Their 250-mile road trip just became a sea voyage! We aren’t sure how his traveling companions heard this bit of news. Perhaps they thought Paul was putting an awful lot of stock in a dream….

If they had any uncertainty, Luke doesn’t say. And to judge by how smooth was the sailing to Macedonia, they probably felt that now God was opening doors all the way! What would take them five days on the return trip, they cover in two. The wind was literally in their sails - that’s a great feeling. Sometimes it is only when we come to end of our own roads, the ones we chose for ourselves, that God will reveal to us a whole new course, an uncharted destination.

Do you think that’s true? Is it possible that sometimes God closes the doors we approach, precisely because we are intended to discover another way? I look at some of you, and I see that you not only think this happens, you know it. You’ve experienced it. I think of a friend of mine from seminary, who was deferred three times by the Theology Committee in her attempt to move along the path to Elder - to become a pastor. Very few could endure such discouragement, but Kathryn believed that God wanted for her to be in ministry, so she resolved to try one more time, a fourth year. Then, she received news from her family that her mother was declining. The memory loss they’d all been noticing had been diagnosed to be of the worst kind, and would soon progress to the point where living at home wouldn’t be an option. Kathryn, worn out already from her bumpy road in the Church, took a leave of absence to move back home and care for her mom full-time. It was far from the future she’d once imagined. In fact, these would be the toughest years of her life.

But God can make a way where there was no way, and God can reveal a destination that was not on our charts. The Lord didn’t leave Jesus in the Tomb, and won’t leave us in Troas, either. Quite a lot of us are right now not where we planned to be, ten or twenty years ago. But we can be sure God is the Giver of visions and the Author of new dreams. My friend Kathryn never did get back on the path to ordination - but she was there for her mother, caring for her needs, singing hymns to her, becoming a sacred gift for her mom by serving as her recovered memory. Now, more than ten years later, Kathryn is a pastoral counselor in a practice that specializes in elder care. Her area of ministry is helping caregivers cope with loss and still find hope in God’s grace. There is no doubt in her mind, or in the minds of those of us who know her, that God led her to use her gifts to the utmost.

Sometimes, like Noah, our job is just to stay afloat, not to steer the course as if there were no Pilot on deck. When your helmsman is the Holy Spirit, you may find like Paul and Silas that the wind fills your sails, and the way is all smooth sailing. But other times, it is not smooth sailing. Sometimes, we might wonder if the Pilot took the day off. Consider what happened when Paul and his friends finally landed and made their way to the bustling commercial center of Philippi. Given the speed of their sea voyage, they probably imagined God would help them plant a church quicker than you can say “bake sale!” But that is not what happened. Luke says that on arrival, “we remained in this city for some days” (v.12), a pretty underwhelming way to launch the Macedonian church! Silas and Timothy might just be thinking: “We came all this way, took all these risks, to get here and wander around?” Sometimes, even when you are trying to follow the new path God has laid before you, there are going to be moments spent wondering if you got the vision right. We may experience frustration all over again. We may even begin to think we’re back in Troas.

If Paul was frustrated, Luke doesn’t say. Luke does say (in v.13) that on the Sabbath, Paul and his colleagues headed upriver to find a place where they hoped Jewish people would be gathered to pray – since there was no formal synagogue in this Gentile town. They found a place of prayer, all right, and there a bunch of…women! At a time when men were seen as dominating political and religious life, a bunch of prayerful women out by a river might not seem like the pot of gold at the end of a missionary’s rainbow! But from out of this group, we are told that Lydia, a successful businesswoman, heard the Word and was baptized. Her household became the very beginning of the Philippian church – the one to which Paul would later write the words: “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy…for all of you, …from the first day until now” (Phil. 1:3-5). We should not miss that this is the planting of the first European church, and therefore the missionary beachhead from which other oceans, including our Atlantic, will in time be crossed. As it turns out, the trip from Troas to Philippi was literally the crossing that changed the world.

And so Acts 16, an obscure little story most Christians haven’t heard, offers us this simple lesson: the ways of the Spirit can be hidden from our eyes. By the Spirit, God can interrupt the path we chose for ourselves, only to remind us that there may be another passage we would not have considered, a door closing and a window thrown open. By the Spirit, God can teach us a lesson of humility, showing us that success may not look like what we expected, or even be what we hoped. Sometimes success may appear as little more than the chance “to go on over and help somebody.” That, after all, was Paul’s vision.

So maybe we shouldn’t be too discouraged when we find ourselves suddenly idle, our sails slack and the way unclear. Sometimes it can take years to see what God brings out of our journey – if we ever get to see the big picture at all. Consider that not one person who witnessed Lydia’s baptism imagined all of us sitting here today. But in time, somebody had a vision and came on over. And maybe one day, you will catch a vision, and make a crossing for the sake of someone else. Turns out, that’s how the world is changed.

Thanks be to God