The Shoe Clerk from Northfield

In 1855, Edward Kimball walked into a Boston shoe store with a single purpose: to speak to a teenage stock boy about Jesus. The young man was Dwight L. Moody — rough-mannered, barely literate, fresh off a farm in Northfield, Massachusetts. He had come to Boston only because his uncle offered him work. Nobody in that city expected much from him.

Kimball himself almost turned back. He worried the conversation would embarrass them both. But something compelled him through that door. He found Moody in the back, wrapping shoes, and spoke simply about the love of Christ.

Moody later said he had never heard anyone talk about God that way — as though the Almighty already knew him, already had a purpose waiting. That brief encounter in a stockroom set in motion a life that would bring the gospel to millions on two continents.

When Philip told Nathanael about Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael scoffed. Nothing significant came from Nazareth. But Jesus had already seen Nathanael under the fig tree — had known him before they ever met. And that knowing shattered every assumption Nathanael carried.

The God who called Nathanael is the same God who sent a Sunday school teacher into a shoe store for a stock boy nobody noticed. He does not wait for us to become impressive. He sees us where we are — wrapping shoes, sitting under fig trees — and speaks our names before we ever think to seek His.