Some of the wisest advice I’ve heard came from comedienne Gracie Allen. Toward the end of her life, in her final love letter to her husband, George Burns, she wrote, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” After every mountaintop experience, there’s a comma and the hard return to the ordinary. And every dark night of the soul is followed by a comma and the dawning of a new day (Lam. 3:22-23).

The Acts of the Apostles includes the story of a brief encounter between the evangelist Philip and a court official from Ethiopia (Acts 8:26-40). About the Ethiopian, we learn only that he was returning home after worshiping in Jerusalem; that he was trying to understand something written by the prophet Isaiah; and that he responded to Philip’s guidance and proclamation of the gospel by being baptized and going on his way rejoicing.

We learn even less about Philip, only that he was moved to take the wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza; that on the road he met the Ethiopian, guided him to understand something in Isaiah, and proclaimed the gospel to him; and that he was then “snatched” away to Azotus in Gaza, where he intended to go.

It’s the briefest encounter, but it changed the Ethiopian’s life and makes me want to know more. Because he was reading Isaiah, he must have known at least a little Hebrew and so must have been well educated. And he seems to have had an active, searching faith that was open to guidance by a stranger he met on the road. What led him to his faith? Who, or what experiences, influenced his openness to something new in life? What made him hungry to grow in his understanding and in his relationship with God?

And what difference did this encounter with Philip make when he returned home? We know that Ethiopia, in eastern Africa a long way from Jerusalem, is home to one of the world’s oldest branches of the Christian church. Did this court official play a role in establishing the church there?

And what about Philip? What prepared him to respond so freely to the impulse to go to Gaza? Who first shared with him the gospel that he shared with others, and what hunger led him to accept it so effectively? What did he do after he arrived in Azotus? He must have done more, probably much more, than serve as host for several days to Paul – more to have a couple of churches in Buffalo take him as their patron saint 2,000 years later.

For these two travelers, before their brief encounter, there was a comma, and before that comma was a lifetime of preparation for that moment. And after their meeting was another comma, after which would come much more that could not be known at the time. That high moment was framed by commas, one before and one after, and those commas can tell us a great deal about a life of faith, yours and mine.

First, the comma tells us to pay attention to what has gone before. The Spirit may have been leading you to this moment without your being aware of it, to be met by someone who has an insight you need. Pay attention to the hunches, the impulses, the God moments that have brought you here, and to the strangers whom you pass on the road. There have been angels that have put you on the road you travel.

Or like it did with Philip, the Spirit may have brought you to this place in this moment to transform the life of someone else, someone you may meet only in passing. Pay attention to the intersections in your life, the serendipitous events and chance meetings. There may be more going on in them than you expect.

Second, the comma tells us that no experience in life ends with a period. In every experience of defeat and loss, there may be something in them that prepares you for what comes next. When you feel yourself breaking down, someone said recently, you may be breaking open instead. Every experience in life may be a door that opens your heart, enlarges your understanding, and leads to new life.

Finally, the high moments in life, the mountaintop experiences, are important, but they are never the destination or the end of the story. At the end of them, God always places a comma. Something always comes next for us or for someone else, even though we may know nothing about it.

So pay attention to the small events, the nudges, the God moments in your life. Let them instruct you and expand your understanding and your faith in what you cannot understand. God doesn’t deal in periods; God deals in commas. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is [God’s] faithfulness. The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord” (Lam. 3:22-23, 25-26).