The Road Beyond the Bend

For forty-two years, Michael knew where he was going when he woke in the morning.

There had been different jobs, different offices and eventually the small engineering business he had built with a friend who retired ten years before he did. There had been difficult years and good ones. There had been days when he drove home convinced he had solved nothing at all. But there had always been somewhere to go on Monday morning.

Now there wasn't.

The alarm still woke him at six because after four decades his body had apparently refused to read the retirement paperwork. He would lie there for several minutes listening to the early traffic and then remember that nobody was waiting for him.

At first he had enjoyed it.

He cleaned the shed. He fixed the back gate. He reorganised a cupboard that had survived quite happily without reorganisation since 1998. His wife Anne watched all this with considerable amusement.

"You know you're allowed to sit down," she told him.

"I sit down."

"You sit down while making lists."

"There is nothing wrong with lists."

"I married a man. I appear to have retired with a clipboard."

Michael laughed. She was right.

But underneath the jokes there was something he had not quite admitted.

He did not know what came next.

It was not simply retirement. Their youngest daughter had moved interstate the previous year. Their eldest son and his family now lived nearly an hour away. Two close friends had moved north. Their church was changing too. A new pastor had arrived. Several familiar faces were gone and younger families were appearing in their place.

Nothing was wrong exactly.

It was simply different.

Michael had always imagined change as something dramatic. A door slammed. A telephone rang in the middle of the night. A doctor said something that divided life into before and after.

He had not realised that sometimes change arrived quietly.

One chair became empty. One routine disappeared. One familiar responsibility passed to somebody else. Then one morning you looked around and discovered that although almost everything was still there, somehow you were standing in a different season of life.

A fortnight after his retirement Anne suggested they drive into the hills.

"Why?"

"Because they're there."

"We've seen them."

Anne looked at him.

Michael reached for the car keys.

They had been driving for nearly an hour when Anne asked him to turn onto a road he did not recognise.

"Where does this go?"

"I don't know."

"That's encouraging."

"It was on the map."

"Maps also show roads in places sensible people never visit."

"Turn left."

He turned left.

The road narrowed as it climbed. Gum trees leaned towards it from both sides and occasionally the valley appeared through gaps in the branches. They passed a farmhouse, a weathered shed and several sheep who regarded Michael's driving with open suspicion.

Then the road bent sharply around the side of the hill.

Michael slowed.

"Can't see much beyond that," he said.

"No."

He drove around the bend.

Beyond it the trees opened suddenly and there was the valley. Green paddocks spread below them beneath a pale blue winter sky. A small church stood near a cluster of houses and further away the hills rose again in layers.

Anne pointed towards a gravel area beside the road.

"Pull over."

They got out.

The air was cold enough to make Michael zip his jacket. For a while they stood without speaking.

"You knew this was here," he said.

"No."

"You sounded very confident."

"I was confident the road continued."

Michael looked back towards the bend they had just rounded.

"You couldn't see that either."

"No."

He smiled. "There is a sermon coming isn't there?"

"Not from me."

"Good."

"I'll leave that to the Lord."

That silenced him more effectively than a sermon would have.

They walked towards an old timber railing at the edge of the lookout. Michael rested both hands on it.

Somewhere below them a tractor was moving slowly across a paddock. A magpie called from the trees behind them. Nothing extraordinary happened. There was no sudden answer to the questions he had carried into retirement.

But a verse came into his mind.

Not one of the triumphant ones.

Not I can do all things or those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.

It was Proverbs 3.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.

Michael had known the verse since he was a boy.

He had always thought of it as guidance for decisions. Which job to take. Whether to move. What to do when there were two roads and he needed God to tell him which one was correct.

Standing at the lookout, he wondered whether he had missed something simpler.

Perhaps trusting God was not always about being shown the road.

Perhaps sometimes it was simply about trusting Him around the bend.

"I think I've been waiting for a plan," he said.

Anne turned towards him.

"For retirement?"

"For everything."

She waited.

Michael looked across the valley.

"I keep thinking there ought to be something next. Some purpose. Something useful."

"You are useful."

"That's not quite what I mean."

"I know."

For a moment neither spoke.

Then Anne said, "Perhaps you don't need the next ten years explained to you."

"I'd settle for five."

"You've got Tuesday."

Michael laughed.

She slipped her hand through his arm.

"You have me. You have the children. You have the grandchildren. You have the church. You have people you can help. You have things you can still learn."

"And Tuesday."

"And Tuesday."

Michael nodded.

It was strange how small the future became when he stopped demanding that God show him all of it at once.

He had spent much of his working life planning. Budgets. Staffing. Maintenance. Contracts. Forecasts. Risk assessments. Planning was not a bad thing. Much of it was wise and necessary.

But somewhere along the way he had quietly assumed that peace came from knowing what happened next.

It didn't.

Christian peace came from knowing Who was already there.

Michael looked again towards the road. From where they stood he could see another bend a few hundred metres further along. Once again the road vanished behind the hill.

He could not see beyond that one either.

Yet nobody looking at it would conclude that the road simply stopped.

That thought stayed with him.

They drove home in the afternoon.

The following morning Michael woke at six.

For a few seconds the old feeling returned. No office. No appointments. Nobody waiting for him to arrive.

Then he remembered the road.

He made tea and sat at the kitchen table with his Bible. He found Proverbs 3 and read the familiar words slowly.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart.

Not trust in the timetable.

Not trust in the five-year plan.

Not trust in his ability to remain useful.

Trust in the Lord.

Michael prayed.

"Father, I don't know what this part of life is going to look like. But You do. Help me stop demanding to see around every bend. Show me what faithfulness looks like today."

He sat quietly for another minute.

Then his phone rang.

It was a man from church asking whether Michael might be willing to help repair several broken cupboards in the community hall.

Michael smiled.

It was not a divine blueprint for the next decade.

It was Tuesday.

And Tuesday was enough.