Divine Appointments

So does everything always go the way you plan or hope that it will? For example, too much traffic caused by an accident makes you late for work. Or you hit every single red light in your attempt to get somewhere quickly. Or maybe you answer the phone without checking the caller ID and it’s your mother or a relative who is going to keep you on the phone longer than you would like to be. Do these sound familiar? If not, then I am sure you can stop and think of some interruption to your plans today already…heck, maybe even like starting to read this.

Let’s face it, interruptions happen, and will keep on happening as long as life remains random and unpredictable. And for the most part this is a good thing. Wanna know how to make it a good thing all of the time? Make it a God thing. Let me explain.

Have you, after one of those daily interruptions, realized looking back that had you not been delayed, you might have been in the wrong place at the right time where something happened? Like hurrying to get through a traffic light and at the last minute you decide to stop, and immediately a car passes through the intersection…knowing that if you had not stopped, you would have been in a terrible accident? Or something like that where a delay or interruption seemed to put you in exactly the right place at the right time to cross paths with someone. Every marriage has one of these stories…every marriage.

We can try to brush them off as coincidences, but I disagree. If we would apply statistical analysis to these events it would soon become clear that for the most part the odds would seem to say they were impossible, but not with God. The odds that my now wife would grow up where she did, when she did, work, move, and live where our lives would somehow intersect (and we lived 90 miles apart) would be astronomical to say the least. And in hindsight we can often see the fingerprints of God in our lives.

Now to change the perspective on those daily inconvenient interruptions or distractions from bad things to good things, we need realize what they really are - a God thing. When we can start to realize as things go wrong and not our way that they may be going God’s way instead of ours, we can realize that as a God thin,g there must be good in where we are or where we are going. But, and this is a big but, we must be willing to trust God even if we don’t get an immediate answer like the car blowing through an intersection we might have been in if we hadn't been delayed leaving the house.

This last week I experienced this first hand when we took some family vacation time to go away to my parent’s cabin. We had plans on getting up early Friday morning, cleaning the cabin, loading the car, and driving the five-plus hours to be home in time for our weekend sports plans, our daughter's play, and of course church on Sunday. Waking up to a foot and a half of newly fallen snow was not in the plans. Being that we were half of a mile up a private unplowed road, we had no practical way of digging out, so we were stuck.

To shorten the story, I don’t know of some miraculous event that happened that I am aware of, and I may never know. But I do know that it was a God thing. After I stopped freaking out about church and made a few phone calls it turned out to be an amazing extra couple of days of vacation that I would not have taken with our family. So instead of shouting at the problem we chose (I took a little longer than the rest of the family) to shout praises to our God and Creator for the time…thank you Jesus!

Maybe the difference between what is going good and bad in your life is not about how you feel about it, but that God feels you and knows exactly where you are.

…just sayin’

In His Grip,

Pastor Pat