Nothing to Rescue
Paris welcomed me differently this time.
From the moment I arrived, the city felt as though it had set aside its usual performance and invited me to experience something quieter, more honest.
I had been here before.
I knew the Paris that makes you lift your chin: the Eiffel Tower stretching impossibly into the sky, the Arc de Triomphe standing magnificent over the rush of traffic, the Louvre holding centuries behind stone and glass.
I knew the Paris that asks to be photographed.
But this time, Paris seemed less interested in impressing me. It wanted me to belong—even if only for a brief while. Not forever. Just while I was there.
I didn't yet understand what it was asking of me.
Later, I would find the words.
Paris was asking whether I could live a day before I had interpreted it. Whether rain could just be rain for a while. Whether getting lost could just mean finding another street. Whether a sleepless night could simply be a sleepless night, a beautiful blouse could simply delight me, and ice cream could simply taste wonderful.
Whether a person's silence could remain unexplained. Whether a disappointing moment could hurt without immediately becoming evidence about my worth, their character, or God's plan, or what I am supposed to learn. That meaning doesn't always have to be manufactured immediately. That uninterpreted life is still livable.
But I didn't know any of that yet.
I had arrived, as always, carrying plans. Places I longed to see. Streets I yearned to wander. Flavors I dreamed of tasting. Expectations, both grand and subtle, packed as carefully as a scarf folded into a suitcase corner—just in case.
But fear had packed a suitcase too.
What if something went wrong? What if we got lost? What if plans changed? What if something happened that I hadn't prepared for?
Expectation and fear are curious travel companions. One arranges tomorrow in shades of hope; the other anxiously checks for cracks in the foundation. Both distract from the moment unfolding right outside the window.
Neither spends much time looking out the window.
Paris began changing that almost immediately. That first evening, the air was soft and mild, and we walked with nowhere urgent to be, breathing the city in as though Paris itself had a scent.
And perhaps it did.
Warm bread drifted from the boulangeries, that deep, toasted smell of crust that makes you hungry even when you've just eaten. Butter and caramelized sugar slipped out of the pâtisseries every time a door opened. Coffee followed people onto the sidewalks. Scooters hummed past. Conversations floated by in French, rising and falling like music, most of them gone before I could catch more than a word or two.
Shop windows glowed gold against pale old stone.
People walked dogs. Someone carried flowers. Someone carried a baguette under one arm, the end already torn off. Someone sat at a tiny table as though sitting at a tiny table were reason enough to stop moving for a while.
I found myself captivated by them.
There was an ease in their movements, a grace I couldn’t quite name. Not laziness. Not carelessness. Something else.
A willingness, perhaps, to truly inhabit the moment, to actually be where they were.
A willingness to experience some of the ordinary inconvenience, a little uncertainty, a little effort, a little imperfection of being alive without immediately needing to engineer a way around it.
And then it started raining.
One cold drop on my wrist. Then my cheek. Then the stones at our feet darkened in spots, and the air changed, that sudden smell of wet pavement and dust rising, the drops tapping harder against the awnings above us.
There went the evening I had imagined.
We hadn't planned for rain. We hadn't researched where to go if the weather changed. I hadn't saved a list titled Best Paris Restaurants for Unexpected Rainy Evenings.
For most of my life, that would have been the moment the machinery started.
All right. New plan. Where should we go? What's nearby? What has the best reviews? When does it close?
Fix the evening before the evening realizes it has gone wrong.
And underneath all of that, quieter and heavier, the other questions would begin.
Should I have known? Did I miss something God was trying to tell me? Is this a closed door? Why didn't I bring an umbrella?
Expectation reaching for a new plan. Fear reaching for someone to blame, usually me.
But there was a restaurant in front of us.
So we walked in. That was it. No recommendation. No carefully researched menu. No social-media stranger assuring me this was one of Paris's hidden treasures.
Just a door.
We opened it.
Warmth greeted my face, melting the chill clinging to my damp sleeves. The room was alive with conversation and the cheerful clink of silverware against porcelain. Wet coats hung at the door, dripping quietly onto the tile, while glasses shimmered in the amber glow above each table. From the kitchen drifted the scent of butter, roasting meat, rosemary, and something golden just drawn from the oven.
Outside, rain streaked the windows and turned the pavement silver.
Inside, my duck arrived, its skin shattering beneath my knife—salty, rich, and decadent—resting alongside layers of golden potatoes, crisp-edged and meltingly soft beneath. It was the kind of dish that inspired silence, because words would only diminish it.
Jesus sat across from me.
For a while, neither of us said much. We ate. We watched.
A woman hurried past beneath an umbrella. A man walked quickly without one, shoulders raised against the rain. A couple squeezed beneath an umbrella clearly intended for a single human being, laughing as one of them lost a shoulder to the weather. Someone walked a dog who appeared completely unconcerned that my carefully imagined Paris evening had been rearranged.
The waiter passed our table with another plate, trailing steam.
Someone laughed behind me.
The door opened, letting in a breath of cold, wet air. More people came in. Life continued.
I took another bite and looked at Jesus.
"I didn't fix this."
He knew exactly what I meant. "No."
"And it's good." I dabbed a little butter from the corner of my mouth.
"Very."
I looked down at my plate. Actually, good wasn't the word. It was sublime.
I laughed quietly.
Jesus tilted His head. "What?"
"I don't know." I looked outside again. "I think that's the strange part."
"What is?" He asked.
"I don't know."
I shrugged, still watching the rain. "I don't know."
He waited, a smile hiding at the corner of His mouth. "You keep saying that."
"I know," I admitted.
His voice was gentle. "It doesn't seem to frighten you tonight."
He was right. This time, the words: I don't know," didn't frighten me.
I watched the rain gather and run down the glass.
"I didn't know this restaurant was here. I didn't know it would rain. I didn't know what we would do when it started. I didn't know whether walking through that door was the right choice."
I looked around the room. "And somehow I am having a wonderful evening."
Jesus smiled.
I leaned back in my chair.
"I've spent so much of my life thinking I had to know first."
"Know what?"
"How things were going to go." I paused. "How to handle them if they didn't. And what it meant if they did."
Outside, an umbrella flipped inside out in the wind, and its owner wrestled it back into shape.
I smiled. "I thought preparation was my shield against disappointment, my guarantee of joy."
Jesus looked at me for a moment. "And did it?"
I knew the answer.
Sometimes. Of course it had. Planning had given me beautiful trips. Research had helped me make wise decisions. Preparation had served me countless times.
But that wasn't really what He was asking.
I had asked preparation to do what it could never promise.
I had asked it to remove surprise.
I had asked foreknowledge to arrive at tomorrow before I even set foot there.
I had asked every raindrop to explain itself.
And perhaps most exhausting of all, I had asked myself to understand life quickly enough that I would never have to simply be inside something I couldn't explain.
"I think I asked too much of it," I said.
He nodded. There was no rebuke in His face.
He turned His glass slowly on the tablecloth, watching the amber light move through it.
"You've spent a long time studying the rain," He said.
"I know."
"Looking for Me in it."
I nodded.
He leaned in, just slightly. "I wasn't hiding in the rain."
The room kept humming around us. A fork clinked against a plate. Rain ticked softly against the glass.
"I was sitting across from you."
I didn't have anything to say to that.
All those years spent searching for Him in closed doors, unanswered prayers, ticking clocks, and shifting weather. Reading about Him. Listening to others explain Him. Striving to understand Him well enough to predict what He wanted next.
And He had been right here.
Not a message.
Not a lesson.
Him.
I looked around again.
The restaurant had not been researched. The rain had not been scheduled. The evening had not been rescued.
And yet, nothing needed rescuing after all.
That thought stayed with me.
Nothing seemed to need rescuing.
Paris outside the window wasn't waiting for the rain to stop before becoming Paris again.
People were still going somewhere. Still arriving somewhere. Still eating. Still talking. Still laughing. Still living.
Not because everything had gone according to plan. Because this was the plan now.
No. Even that wasn't quite right. Because perhaps not everything needed to become a plan.
I smiled.
Jesus noticed. "What?"
"I almost did it again."
"Did what?"
"Turned this into something I have to understand."
His smile widened.
I shook my head. "No. I'm not doing it."
“Doing what?” He asked, eyes bright with quiet amusement.
"I'm not making a lesson out of my potatoes."
That sent Him into genuine, unguarded laughter.
And there it was.
The rain against the window. The warmth of the room. Butter still on my tongue. A city I had traveled thousands of miles to see, carrying on beyond the glass. And Jesus laughing across the table.
Nothing to decode. Nothing to rescue. Nothing to become before I was allowed to enjoy it.
I had come to Paris expecting beauty. I had also come prepared for what might go wrong.
And somewhere between those two, I had forgotten there was a third possibility.
Life.
Not the life I had planned. Not the life I had feared.
The one actually happening.
In the days that followed, I kept stumbling into it.
Mornings began at a little pâtisserie, croissant flakes scattering across the table and down my sleeve, coffee warming my hands while Paris hurried past the window on its way to work.
We sat beneath the Arc de Triomphe, the old stone cool behind us, traffic circling it like water around a rock. Then, on the way home, we got lost, and a short walk became a long, looping one through streets we never meant to see.
At the Eiffel Tower, the afternoon began golden, sun warm on our shoulders. Then the wind came up out of nowhere, suddenly cold, and we pulled our jackets tighter and stayed anyway.
None of it demanded interpretation.
The wind at the tower wasn't a verdict. The long way home wasn't a lesson I had failed to learn in time.
It was wind. It was a wrong turn. It was a croissant.
And still, old habits walk a long way with you.
One afternoon, after another wrong turn, I heard myself starting again, half out loud.
“Maybe we were supposed to get lost. Maybe this is where He wanted us to—” I began.
Jesus glanced at me sideways.
"Potatoes," He said.
I laughed so hard I had to stop walking.
Can God speak through ordinary things? Of course.
Can He redirect, surprise, protect, whisper, delight? Absolutely.
But I didn't need to decode a wrong turn to walk it with Him.
We could get lost together. We could change plans together. We could sit over dinner while rain rearranged the evening outside.
The relationship didn't disappear because the explanation did.
Maybe that was the ease I had been noticing all along.
Not a Parisian secret.
Just something Paris let me see, a question I could not stop asking:
When did getting the outcome I want become important enough that I stopped asking what kind of life I want to live while getting there?
I hadn’t simply learned to tolerate the unexpected.
I had discovered that the unexpected could be lived—and even cherished.
Still, it's that first evening I keep returning to.
The rain beginning to soften against the glass.
Normally, that would have been my cue.
Where next? What can we still fit in? What did we miss? What time is it?
Instead, I reached for another piece of bread—the crust crackling beneath my fingers, the center radiating warmth.
Jesus was still there.
Paris was still there.
So was I.
And for the first time, that felt like more than enough.
I don't need life completely interpreted, optimized, anticipated, and secured before I enter it. And I do not need to remove every difficulty from life before I can call life good.
Life is allowed to be life.
And somehow I discovered that I could be there for it.
Not ahead of it fixing it.
Not behind it analyzing it.
Not standing beside it trying to extract the lesson.
In it, with Him, living the life in front of me so that I am not perpetually standing outside of it, auditing whether it has become good enough yet.
More like:
Everything doesn't have to become easy for me to be okay inside the life that's happening.
Eating. Walking. Laughing. Getting lost. Finding the way. Sitting in cafés. Getting cold. Changing plans. Seeing beautiful things. Being annoyed. Recovering. Continuing.
Paris gave me something optimization culture cannot sell. Enoughness in an unfinished life.
Not everything was optimized. I didn't have perfect weather. I didn't have perfect directions. My body wasn't guaranteed to get sick. My skin misbehaved. Plans changed. I was occasionally tired.
Things didn't always happen when or how I expected.
And yet... nothing essential was missing from my day.
Because optimization says:
Fix enough variables, and then you can relax.
Paris whispered something almost opposite:
You can live before all the variables are fixed.
And perhaps that is the deepest Paris lesson yet:
I don't want to become so occupied improving my life that I have no time left to inhabit it.
For years I had asked tools, knowledge, health practices, even spiritual practices, to promise me certainty about tomorrow. I love useful things. I still do. But somewhere along the way, I had started believing that if I managed life well enough, ordinary human difficulty would finally stop reaching me.
Paris gave me something no optimization can sell: the confidence that I could live and enjoy the day I actually got. Living and managing life are not the same thing. I don't want to become so busy improving my life that I have no time left to inhabit it.
When people ask me about Paris, I tell them it was amazing. And it really was. I loved every bit of the Parisian life: croissants in the morning, long walks with nowhere to be, a dinner I never researched, rain turning the pavement silver, laughter so sudden I had to stop walking.
For once, I wasn't managing life.
I was living it.
I let it lead me, and He was there in all of it.
Not explaining it.
Sharing it.
And that is more than enough.
Whispers to the Heart
Dear Heart, maybe it rained on something you had planned this week. Maybe a door you didn't choose is standing right in front of you.
You don’t have to fix the evening before you’re allowed to rest in it. You don’t have to decipher it before you can taste its sweetness.
He isn’t waiting on the far side of your understanding, arms crossed, until you figure it all out.
He's already at the table.
Linger at the Table
When something rearranges your plans, what is the first question that rises in you? What might happen if, next time, you simply walked through the door in front of you?
Think of one ordinary moment from this week: a meal, a walk, a rainy afternoon. What did it smell like, taste like, sound like? Can you let it simply be good, without asking it to mean anything more?
Is there something in your life right now you don't understand yet? What would it feel like to sit with Jesus in the middle of it, not to figure it out, but just to be with Him?
A few verses to sit with:
Deuteronomy 29:29, Ecclesiastes 9:7, Psalm 16:11
