“Green dust” is what I called the phenomenon in Spain, whence a college student named Rachel emailed me to convey the spiritual oppression that hovers over the place, and the difficulty of finding other people who believe in “absolutes.”

I wrote a column around the letter for WORLD, not at all guessing I was engaging in a Holy Spirit networking on Rachel’s behalf. I had pretty much written off Spain — and all Europe — as post-Christian and doomed.

Then the emails rolled in:

Natalie, a missionary in Mexico, directed me to friends Pastor David and Elisabet in Barcelona. So, coincidentally, did Art and Juanita. Joyce told of “lots of vibrant churches” in the Pueblo Nuevo area and sent contact info. Gordon and Kathie are Christians living in Madrid, but are willing to drive the six hours to Barcelona to meet Rachel.

Sharla spent her junior year in Barcelona a while back and is still in touch with the former pastor’s daughter. Sharla had hung out a lot at their house. The present pastor is British and speaks flawless Castillian. He recently had Sharla and other Americans over after church.

“B” sent contact info for YFC directors for Spain. He and his wife Barb were missionaries in Seville with TEAM for 13 years. Benjamin is an American college student in Barcelona who wants to meet Rachel.

Elijah complained to the Lord that was the only believer left in Israel. God replied that as a matter of fact he was wrong: God had 7,000 believers there that Elijah knew nothing about. So there.

This is not sour grapes; these are sweet enough for me.

It would be nice, I suppose, when strangers ask me where my son graduated from, to say U Penn instead of the penitentiary. But do not overlook the fringe benefits of disaster; you probably have some in your own life:

My two boys, seven years apart in age, never had relationship, which was a constant grief for me. I don’t know if the younger one even knew what his brother’s handwriting looked like; only the back of his hand now and then. What freedom couldn’t do captivity achieved, and they have become penpals over the past two years.

I heard someone ask my son, before his incarceration, what he likes to read. He, in his dismissive manner, “Reading makes my head hurt.” Once in prison he read everything he could get his hands on, and was pleased when transferred to a prison that was reputed to have the best library in the system.

And if he had gone to U Penn, I just wonder if I would have received the letter from him that I got on February 27, 2007, from solitary confinement, that began, “Dear Mom, I thought you’d like to know that I asked Jesus to be my Savior last night.”

There’s a new billboard on Cheltenham Avenue in Philadelphia. Giant letters spell out “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John4:18). I drove past and smiled and thought, “God, you’re so sneaky!”

That’s because I remember how my Jewish friend Jenny was converted: someone had given her a Bible, and she prayed, “Jesus, if you’re real, let me know it.” Later, driving to the Pocono Mountains she saw a billboard displaying a large picture of Jesus with outstretched arms and the words “Jesus is with you.”

And then I remembered that an ocean and a few decades away C.S.Lewis had noticed the same thing — how God places these salvation “trap doors” everywhere, in the unlikeliest places.

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it was ambush by wardrobe during a game of hide-and-seek. In Prince Caspian it was a passenger train. In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, it was a framed picture of a ship.

I’m sure there is lots of statistical proof that billboards, door-to-door gospel presentations, TV evangelism, short-term youth group missions trips, and “the fours spiritual laws” are ineffective. But you need to see Jenny about that. I myself was sucked into a spiritual vortex thirtysomething years ago on my way to the life of a hitchhiking vagabond

I was lost recently in the New Jersey “pine barrens.” I pulled my car to the side of a little-trafficked road in order to read my mapquest backwards (Know what I mean?).

As I was parked, I happened to look out the window at the evergreens and underbrush and sandy soil. I wondered to myself I anyone had ever stopped exactly here and looked at this particular tree that my gaze alighted on. I ventured to guess that the answer was no: this tree had in all likelihood grown from seed to seedling to stately adulthood never having been admired by the human eye.

I though about the constellations of stars that have never been seen and never will be. The Atheist must draw the conclusion that that is an unconscionable waste of electric power! The Evolutionist must explain the embarrassing extravagance of God by positing millions of peopled planets beyond our telescope who must enjoy them.

What struck me was something about God’s “unnecessary” love. He lavishes care on the flower not seen — clothing it, watering it, sunning it, though it will never be beautiful for anyone but himself.

“Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no man is, on the desert in which there is no man, to satisfy the waste and desolate land….?” (Job 38:25-27)

I’ve been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters. It is striking, how he integrated a painful realism regarding the depravity of mankind, and in particular the Nazi regime that eventually murdered him, with an optimism that God’s providence, writ in miracles as well as nature, would overcome such evils. “I believe,” he wryly wrote, “that even our mistakes and shortcomings are turned to good account, and that it is no harder for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds.”

Here was a man who was safely abroad, but chose to return to Germany under the conviction that pastors who did not endure with their people would be in no position to lead a restoration once Nazism was defeated. A Christian and therefore peaceful, he nonetheless conspired to kill Hitler. He wrestled with the responsibilities of a Christian man in the face of evil. As I consider my responses — and more grievously, my non-responses — to our present day’s evils, I find Bonhoeffer’s worldview illuminating:

“The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live. It is only from this question, with its responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.”

In the end he came to know greater humiliation; on a drizzly day weeks before the war’s end, he was led from his cell, ordered to strip naked, and shot. It is edifying, therefore, to see how Bonhoeffer regarded his persecutors. In his letter titled “After Ten Years,” he wrote something that has convicted me, and subsequently grieved me as I think about how I and many of us in the church sometimes regard sinners:

“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. The only profitable relationship to others — and especially to our weaker brethren — is one of love, and that means the will to hold fellowship with them. God himself did not despise humanity, but became man for men’s sake”

I thought of this recently as I saw a car with a window sticker that read: NOTHING FAILS LIKE PRAYER

My instinct was to despise the car’s owner, but I thought about what Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell. It occurred to me, then, that perhaps the car’s owner is right. When your worldly options are exhausted, so that you cry to God for release from suffering, or for someone you love to be spared, and this pleading is met with apparent silence, maybe there is no greater sense of abandonment. Maybe there is nothing like a prayer that seems to have failed.

The car’s owner probably didn’t intend for it to be read that way. I pondered what suffering must lead a rational adult to spend time fastening six-inch high letters to his window that shout to God: You weren’t there for me. I considered the pain of suffering strangers and aliens, those who are stricken by the world, yet do not know God. Of course they would slap offensive slogans on their cars and bodies, and spit at the image of Christ, and busy themselves with distraction and self-destruction. Wouldn’t you or I, absent that still, small voice?

So instead of hating the car’s owner, I tried to regard him, as Bonhoeffer urged, in the light of his suffering. And then I prayed for him. Then I prayed thanks to God, for the pleadings answered and the pleadings denied, because in my striving with him he has been there. Even when I thought him absent, he was there. This, more than any immediate answer to my wants, is the blessing to which I cling.