My dictionary defines a “sleeper” as “someone or something unpromising or unnoticed that suddenly attains prominence or value.”

Sometimes a “sleeper” is a verse you didn’t notice before, and that is now overturning your life. Such as Romans 15:13: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Another version puts it this way: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and hope in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”

I have been looking for personal “joy” and “peace” ever since I saw them in the list of fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22,23) and decided that it’s not normal, after thirty years, for a fruit tree to not have better fruit. It’s not God’s fault either. Like he said through the prophet: “What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it?” (Isaiah 5:4).

Maybe there was something I wasn’t doing. I found it in this sleeper verse. Fruit like “joy” and “peace” is all of grace, yes. But these comes only as you trust in him. They come only in believing.

I’m being very existential about this. I am experiencing joy these days as I am in this moment believing God, not as I am disbelieving God. It’s really that simple — as all of the “sleeper” verses in the Bible are.

God not only wants to change your life, he wants to change your day. That’s what women’s Bible teacher Beth Moore said, and I like it a lot. I’m tired of plans to change my life. I’m about ready to have my day changed instead. I may even give up on that and just change my present moment. Excuse me a minute….

One day I tried to count all the times in Francis Schaeffer’s book True Spirituality where he talked about changing your day. It’s only 180 pages but it became almost impossible because he said it in so many ways. He bent over backwards. He exhausted English vocabulary. It was his only point in the book, really: Trust God this minute on the clock. Believe God’s many promises for your life now. Claim the present power of the blood of Jesus for your life immediately.

“When we say we live in a personal universe and God the Father is our Father, to the extent that we have less than a trusting attitude we are denying what we say we believe. We say that as Christians we have by choice taken the place of creatures before the Creator, but as we show a lack of trust we are exhibiting that at that moment, in practice, we have not really so chosen.” (Italics his)

I have to do it all the time: I rebuke unbelief and make a conscious choice to say with Jesus, “I will put my trust in him” (Hebrews 2:13). And it changes my day.

A woman at a retreat in New Jersey was at a very happy time in her life: her children were little and adorable, her husband loved her, they had money enough, and health. So what was her problem? Well, when things are so good, and when you see others around you, no more or less deserving, who suffer, then you become fearful “waiting for the other shoe to drop,” as she put it.

I understand that fear. Do I trust God’s gifts, or do I wonder if they are a set-up for a fall? We are always reminded that God is not a “tame” Lion. Is it quite safe, then, to be happy when something good comes our way?

Today I am blissful about a wonderful thing God has brought into my life. Do I dare give myself over to its full enjoyment, or will I be put to shame, even as I am in the midst of praising God for it?

The Proverb says “Guard your heart” (4:23) — but, surely, not against God! Surely it means against temptations of various kinds. It cannot be that God’s gifts are Trojan horses, not “the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:16). Everything that your eyes can recognize as a “good gift” (v.16) is a good gift, so “do not be deceived” (v.16) to think otherwise. Enjoy with abandon your little children, your house, and the spouse the Lord has given you. And if the Lord sees fit to send a time of suffering by and by, there will be grace aplenty for that too.

I need a prenuptial agreement with the Lord. I get nowhere in this mindset of forever looking at the outcomes of things to decide if he is trustworthy or not.

Outcome leads to outcome — one seems bad, but then turns good, and then turns bad again. There is no end to this. To make it work, you would need to see the end of the entire chain, and no man sees that. In other words, you would need the omniscience of a god.

I was talking to a man who was ready to bail out of his relationship with God because he hadn’t slept two nights in a row, in spite of much prayer. If there had been dirt handy, and sackcloth on my back, I would have repented for us both in the Old Testament way.

Here is my Prenuptial with my Husband. Here are my terms and legal conditions regarding the possible future dissolution of this marriage. Let the angels be my witnesses and Saint Peter notarize:

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation (Habakkuk 3;17,18).

(No “sunset provision” for agreement, by either party, to expire this contract.)

We all have to trust one another. That is to say, we are put in a position of having to trust one another just in order to live.

I think of it most acutely when I get on an airplane, though it’s always true. As I buckle in and hear the engines rev, I always wonder about the mechanic who serviced the aircraft — perhaps on a Monday morning, with a hangover, after an unfinished argument with the wife, or harboring a grievance with the airline.

I have no choice; I need to get to Atlanta.

Not just individuals but corporate entities have to do some trusting. One of France’s largest banks, Société Général, trusted a 31-year-old trader and he cost them $7.2 billion for their confidence a month ago.

Our own banks, which borrow as much as 90% of every dollar they invest, trust that the borrowed money is good. At least they used to.

Some acts of trust are based on better assumptions than others — but all trust is based on assumptions. Till recently banks’ assumptions were that housing prices would keep rising, and that computer-generated evaluations of the markets were infallible.

My own personal assumption is that the God of the Bible backs up his Word.

How will we fare in 2008? What disasters, like serpents eggs, are even now congealing that will hatch before year’s end?

I received my “World Challenge” monthly newsletter from David Wilkerson’s Times Square church. He writes: “Every Christian claims to trust the Lord. Yet in reality, many of God’s children aren’t ready to face the black storm coming upon the world.”

My inmate correspondent Bubba says the reason “the five foolish virgins” of Matthew 25 didn’t bring extra oil with them for the wedding banquet was because they didn’t really believe the groom was coming. I had never thought of that.

The Friar in Romeo and Juliet warned Romeo that “vague confession yields vague absolution.” Similarly, Wilkerson says many of us trust God vaguely: “Most Christians have a general trust in the Lord.” That kind of trust won’t do when the crunch comes, he says. We need to know the promises of God and claim them. The Puritans called it “suing for grace.” Wilkerson says “every promise of the Lord is a holy argument.”

A kind soul sent me a calendar for 2008, each day footnoting a specific promise of God. Heck, I didn’t even know there were 365 promises in the Bible, did you?

Recently one of the men in our church took to the pulpit, his usual poise replaced by a hint of nervousness. The person who was to give an update on one of the missions we support was ill; this man was his replacement. “I haven’t had time to prepare,” he explained. I understood his dismay. He is one of those men who is well organized, and thoughtful with his statements, and always very straightforward. Ordinarily, when he speaks to a crowd he is like a guided missile zooming toward its target. But there he was, standing in front of a couple hundred people, with no preparation. I leaned into my wife and whispered, not sarcastically, “This ought to be good.”

And it was. He confessed his hardness of heart toward Muslims, with whom some of our missionaries work. It choked him up, this fact springing up on him unplanned, and as he confessed it his voice caught, and he explained that it is only by grace that any one of us sitting comfortable in his salvation is not lost.

I like to think it took courage to speak the truth that way to all those people, or at least this is what I told myself as I wandered about the streets of Kansas City this weekend, trying to find the church where I was to deliver a talk about fathering. You see, I am one of those speakers as well, who likes to prepare well in advance. But the week had overtaken me, and I had finally decided to rise early the morning of the talk, avail myself of a Starbucks near the church, and compose a brilliant speech to the sound of Joni Mitchell and the smell of roasted Ethiopian Sidamo.

The church, according to GoogleMap, was only ten miles from my hotel. I left two and a half hours early. That should have afforded me ample time to prepare my speech. Instead, I got lost.

As I tried to navigate the bends and one-ways and angled off-shoot streets that must have amused the drunken madman who laid out Kansas City, I began to lose my cool. I was supposed to give a talk on fathering — didn’t God know that? I began to lose my temper. I hate being in front of a group when I am unprepared. I tried to compose my thoughts while driving, but all I could come up with was an opening joke about how having a map in Kansas City is like having a Bible in a strip joint.

Finally, half an hour before I was supposed to be at the church, I found its street, and a Starbucks. I rushed inside, placed my order, and sat down to jot at least a few notes on index cards. Then I made my way to the church, dreading what was about to transpire.

I met there with men who are striving to become better fathers. They put me up on a stage, and sat attentively, waiting. Lacking the grandiose speech with which I’d intended to afflict them, I confessed the ways I have failed as a husband and father. I told them I am trying to break generations of despair and sin, and that often I lose that battle. I explained that most of the time, I don’t feel like I’m anything close to what a man ought to be. I said that while there are plenty of books on how to train children, it seems to me that their sin begins with us, and that we ought to address our own darkheartedness whenever we start to fret over their behavior. I told them my story, without an opportunity to dress it up in the way that many of us do. I waited for them to throw rotten fruit.

Instead, a 15-minute question-and-answer session scheduled at the end of my talk became an hour-long discussion. Some men confessed their own shortcomings as fathers. Others offered encouragement. I felt like I was part of something, as opposed to the feeling I had been set on, which was to direct something. I had envisioned this being about me, but even as it involved laying out more of me than I’d intended to share, it became about all of us who are trying to be better fathers. If I’d had time, I could have delivered a much better speech. But I’m thinking it’s a good thing I didn’t have that time.

It’s funny how sometimes God does his best work by first wrecking all of our plans, isn’t it?