This week, we had a costly and much-needed repair project take place at our home. Our old sewer line needed replacing. It was not something we had in our budget, but such is life. 

Our house was moved onto our lot in 1948. It was a small officer’s dwelling from a World War II military base here in southern Oregon called Camp White. When the base was decommissioned, the houses were sold off at auction and moved to various locations in our valley. Over the last seventy years, the sewer pipes had become compromised. Roots from our trees would fill the line requiring a twice-yearly de-rooting. 

We contacted a plumbing contractor who specializes in trenchless technology. They employ something called a bursting head. It is a pointed steel device pulled by a cable through the old clay pipe cracking the pipe and towing into place behind the bursting head a new plastic pipe. It is all done underground and out of sight. No surface trenching is required. Lawns don’t get torn up. Trees don’t die because their root system was severed. The plumbing contractor pulled a hundred feet of new sewer line underground. Our new pipe should last long after Jan and I are gone.

As I watched this unique way of replacing an underground pipe, I thought of how God can work in our lives.  Some of His most profound work is done out of sight and literally, out of mind. We think we need to always be aware of what He is doing or that He only does things we have prayed about or can understand with our intellect. I used to think that way until I understood something deeper about the nature of God.  Many times His love will not burden us with the details of a process of restoration. He just does it – out of sight and out of mind. When these projects of restoration are finished all we can do is worship Him and thank Him.

Like our old sewer line, some of what has worked in the past in your life may no longer be working. Parts of your life might have become clogged. You know God is doing something new and you may see the beginning of that work like I did when I saw the bursting head first enter the old pipe in the trench. I would not be able to see what was taking place underground that would eventually install the new pipe. It reminded me of those times in my life when God did something for me simply because He loves me without requiring my moment-by-moment participation or my understanding. 

These hidden works of God inch along unseen toward the other end of a problem where a new connection is finally made and a miracle takes place. At that moment, we realize all the work was being done under our feet, unnoticed, as we went about the daily affairs of our lives. That is how God will, at times, accomplish a seemingly impossible task just because He loves us.