Several years ago I was visiting family in Southern
California and attended a church service down there. During the service they had an open-mic
opportunity for people to share what God had been doing in their life. Having grown up going to church, I know this
is always a dangerous situation. You run
the risk of getting the guy who just likes to talk into microphones. There’s the lady who can’t stop crying about
her neighbor’s dog who has some sort of a blockage. The couple who needs prayer
about whether they should get the XL or the XLT version of the car their
thinking about. As soon as the mic
started going around I had already started my internal eye-rolling.
It turns out I was in store for a spiritual slap in the
head. A lady, I’ll call her “Marge”,
stood up and mentioned that she was just going about her day a couple of weeks
ago when she got this overwhelming feeling to write “Sarah” a note. She commented, “I don’t typically write
notes, but I felt like I was going to go crazy if I didn’t write Sarah a
note.” So she jotted down something
simple, like “I just wanted you to know that Jesus loves you, and so do I” and
put it in the mail. What she didn’t know
was that Sarah’s adult daughter had died a few days before. Sarah was feeling overwhelmed and that God
had abandoned her, and then she received Marge’s note. Marge said she felt good that God could use
her in this way, gave a few more details, and then sat down.
A skeptic would see this as a coincidence. A Christian might think this is a wonderful
story of how God works; more significant and obvious than little Johnnie
getting over his cold or the house finally selling, but an extension of the
same thing. But this was not the typical
“God told me…” story I was expecting, and I felt a little ashamed for my
preemptive eye-rolling. Everyone in that
church service was getting a window into what it looks like when God needs
something done, and a Christian has put themselves in a position to do it. Here is a lady who just lost her daughter and
is experiencing untold amounts of grief.
This doesn’t escape God’s notice, and although He has an infinitely
bigger picture of life and death, He feels her pain just the same. So He taps Marge on the shoulder and tells
her to write a note to Sarah. If this is
true (and it sure sounded authentic to me), then the Creator of the Universe…let
me repeat that, the Creator of the Universe just demonstrated a personal
awareness and compassion for what Sarah was going through, and pressed Marge
into service. There was no sense of
“please.” In Marge’s words, “I was going
to go crazy if I didn’t write a note.”
Now, admittedly, Marge certainly felt good about being able to bring
some comfort to Sarah, but that wasn’t what had the impact on me. The impact was that THE GOD OF THE UNIVERSE
looked around for someone who had the spiritual maturity to listen, found
Marge, and said (commanded) “Marge, write Sarah a note.”
I want to do stuff like that. If God is real, then we have no purpose than to serve Him and carry out whatever part of His plan He has for us. On that day for Marge, it was to comfort one of His children who was hurting by writing a note. In order to put herself into a position where she would "go crazy" if she didn't do what God was telling her to do, Marge probably has a fairly rigorous spiritual discipline regimen. It probably involves prayer, and solitude, and study, and community with others. But the goal isn't to fulfill an obligation to practice spiritual disciplines, or make her life more fulfilling. It's so that when God says "go do this," she can hear it (obviously fairly strongly) and respond with "I got this covered." Marge didn't know it (another by-product of her doing what God told her), but she really had an impact on me in terms of how I should view my personal and professional life, the purpose of spiritual disciplines, and the immaturity of eye-rolling in church.
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