Steve Jobs and the Road to Emmaus
This is a season for celebrating graduations and milestones, and every year around this time inspiring videos college commencement addresses fill the interwebs.
One of my favorite speeches is the one the late Steve Jobs, legendary founder of Apple, gave at Stanford University in 2005. It has over 26 million views. Personally, I’ve listened to it many times, especially at times of transition, questioning, and what turned out to be turning points. Here’s the whole video:
My favorite part of the speech is when we says, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
Sometimes we try to line up the dots of our lives looking forward. We want to know what will happen and how things will turn out. But life doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes its only when we look back that we can see and appreciate how the dots connected.
Have you ever had a moment when you’ve looked back and seen how the dots of your life connected?
Hold that thought.
There’s a story in the Bible (one of the my favorites) called The Road to Emmaus. The story goes that two disciples were walking down a road when another person joins them and walks alongside them. It’s Jesus but they don’t know it. The last thing they heard, Jesus had been crucified and buried, dead and gone.
So, they are talking with this guy for literally miles but don’t recognize its Jesus. It’s only when they have dinner with him in Emmaus that he realize its him—and then, poof, he’s gone.
They turn to each other and say, “Weren’t our hearts burning within us while we talked to him on the road?”
It was only in retrospect that they connected the dots. God can be like that. We want answers and solutions and assurances, but ultimately walk by faith, hope, trust, into the mystery of life.
Have you ever had an Emmaus moment, when you looked back and said, “wasn’t my heart burning,” or “God was in this place and I didn’t know it?”