There’s a moment in Acts 1 that I’ve read a hundred times and only recently stopped rushing past. Jesus has ascended. The disciples are standing there, completely still, staring into the sky, with the look of people who have just witnessed something that broke every category they owned. And two angels appear, not with fanfare, but with a question that sounds almost tired of waiting: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?” (Acts 1:11).
Jesus never let wonder become a permanent address.
He pulled fishermen off boats before they’d finished processing the catch. He sent the seventy-two out while they were still nervous (Luke 10:1). He told the man he healed to pick up his mat immediately, while the feeling was still fresh. The pattern never changes. An encounter with God does not end in stillness. It ends with feet moving toward someone who needs them.
I learned this the hard way on a Sunday morning I almost wasted.
The service had been one of those rare ones. I walked out full. Genuinely full, the way you feel after a meal with people you love. And there was a woman sitting on the curb outside, crying into a phone. I saw her and kept walking for about four steps before something stopped me.
I sat down beside her on the curb.
I don’t remember everything. I remember she was behind on rent. I remember she laughed once, suddenly, and then looked almost startled by the sound of it, like she hadn’t heard herself laugh in a while and didn’t quite trust it. I remember thinking, somewhere in the uncomfortable middle of that conversation, that this felt more honest than anything that had happened inside the building behind us.
Jesus said, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). He didn’t say whatever you felt during worship. He didn’t say however long you stood with your eyes closed. He placed himself inside the hungry, the stranger, the one everyone steps around. He said, in language plain enough to sting: I’m already there. You’re the one who needs to arrive.
That one sentence rearranges everything.
God is not waiting only at the altar. He’s on the curb. He’s in the back pew, held together by routine and quiet desperation. He’s in the face of the man who comes to church every Sunday not because he’s certain of anything but because he cannot survive another week of no one knowing his name. He was already with that woman before I sat down. I didn’t bring him there. I just finally stopped being somewhere else.
The early church understood this with a simplicity that convicts me. They had no buildings, no platform, no polished strategy. They had a risen Lord and the unshakeable conviction that mercy was not optional (Acts 2:44–45). Persecution scattered them, and wherever they landed, the gospel traveled the only way it ever really travels, through one person sitting down with another, staying longer than was comfortable, and meaning it (Acts 8:4). Isaiah said it centuries earlier and it still has not softened: real faithfulness feeds the hungry, houses the homeless, and breaks chains (Isaiah 58:6–7). James said faith that watches need to walk past it is not weak faith. It’s no faith at all (James 2:17).
I don’t think either of them was trying to shame anyone.
I think they were just tired of people staring at the sky.
The angels were not wrong to interrupt the disciples. Wonder is not the enemy. It’s fuel. It is the thing that reminds you who you’re following and why. But fuel is only meaningful when something moves.
And outside, right now, someone is sitting on a curb.
You’re already here.
