I love throwing a stone on the smooth surface of a calm lake. The ripples spread out in every direction, moving, then breaking. The stone disappears, but its effects continue to disturb the water all the way to the shore, where I stand.

At the time, I didn’t realize the impact that call in the middle of the night would have. As a pastor, I’d gotten many of them. In my mind they were just part of the job.

The call had come from the Newtons, an older couple in the church whom I knew well. Teri had called me, asking if I could take them to the hospital. You might think she’d just call the hospital, but J.D. wasn’t having a full-fledged heart attack. He was just having chest pains, enough that they were concerned. J.D. was closing in on seventy with Teri probably about ten years younger. She didn’t want her husband driving, and she struggled driving at nighttime. So I hadn’t hesitated. They lived only ten minutes from us.

It took about an hour for J.D. to get checked out. I decided to wait outside the hospital, reading on my iPhone in the sanctuary of my Prius. Sometimes hospitals overwhelmed me simply because there was so little I could do there. Yes, I could pray, but sometimes it felt as if there had been too many prayers left unanswered in this building in front of me.

God has a plan, I have always believed that. But I also know that in some cases—or what recently has felt like many cases—we don’t get to see that plan. I think that’s what Heaven will be. An eternity of recognizing the plans we never got to see and seeing the answers to the prayers we thought went unheard.

I put my phone away the moment I saw Teri guiding J.D. back to my car. They were a cute couple. I know that word can often be used for infants and elderly folks, but they really were cute. I know they were a good-looking couple when they were younger. J.D. had made it a point to show me a few Polaroid pictures at church one Sunday evening. They showed the couple when they were much younger. To say his wife was mortified was quite the understatement.

“Sorry to rush you out here, pastor,” J.D. had told me as I greeted them on the curb.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“False alarm,” he said in a bit of a growl. “My pacemaker thought the battery was running low. Pretty sure I could’ve driven myself.”

“No worries, J.D. Better safe than sorry.”

Teri smiled. “He still thinks he’s seventeen . . .”

“Whereas she’s convinced I’m a hundred and seventeen,” J.D. replied. “Personally, I like my fallacy better.”

Teri gave her amused husband a not-so-amused look, a kind that I’d seen my wife give me plenty of times.

“You think this is funny?” Teri asked him. “We’ve lost enough already. I’m not ready to lose you, too.”

That was enough to shut both J.D. and myself up. Women have a way of doing that with men. And in most cases, it’s probably necessary.

Moments later, as I drove them home through the streets of Chicago, still busy even at this hour, the silence felt a bit thick in my small car. I didn’t press them. Death was nothing to joke about. I had seen enough of it to know this firsthand.

J.D. decided to break the silence.

“You realize we’re both gonna die eventually, right?”

He said this with his head turned, facing his wife in the backseat. I couldn’t see her expression, but I could tell she wasn’t amused by his tone.

“I do,” Teri said. “But if you were a gentleman, you’d let me go first.”

I couldn’t help laughing at that. J.D. continued to keep the smile on his wrinkled face.

“Duly noted,” he told his wife.

I stopped at a light, scanning the intersection. It suddenly dawned on me that I’d turned down a street I usually never drive down in order to get to the Newtons’ home quicker. And that was fine, but the hospital was near Washington Park, and it’s not the best neighborhood in the city.

I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.

That’s why the sight on the sidewalk next to us surprised me.

It was a girl—had to be a teenager—walking by herself alongside a brick building. On the corner was a liquor store. Farther down the street was a bar, one of those that stayed open twenty-four hours. There were no stores or apartment complexes or restaurants nearby. I had no idea what the girl was doing on this block.

For a second I began to think that maybe she was selling herself, but then I noticed something even more surprising.

She was pregnant.

She didn’t look at our car and she kept to herself. J.D. and Teri kept talking, so they didn’t notice the young girl. But I did. For a minute.

Then the light turned green and I moved on down the street. Away from the intersection and the dangerous neighborhood and this figure walking alone.

Part of me wanted to ask her if she was okay, if she needed help, if she needed a lift. But I already had the Newtons in my car. And hey—it was cramped enough with three people. So I simply watched that figure slowly disappear in my rearview mirror.

I simply kept driving, doing what anybody else probably would have done.

I think about that girl right now and I know something.

I used to think the most important thing was watching those ripples expand from the center of the throw. But I don’t think that anymore.

Now I know that the most important thing is deciding to throw the rock in the first place, to not worry about what happens and the impact it will have. You’ll never be able to see that fully. But there will always be ripples that follow. Always.