I was sitting in Barnes and Noble
reading the book “Love Your God With All Your Mind” by J.P. Moreland and making my way through the second chapter of the
book. As I was reading, a young man approached my table and asked me if I had
been writing backwards on my 3x5 notecard! I assumed immediately about writing
from right to left (as you do in the Hebrew language in case you didn’t know)
but he actually was referring to writing upside down! After showing me what he
meant, I got the point.
He pulled up a chair and we started
talking about college. I can’t remember where exactly we started, but
eventually we got into the usual discussion of apologetics and growing as a
person in cultivating our minds. From the get go, I didn’t know he was a
Christian. So as a result I tried framing my answers in a way he would
understand so as not to become confused.
Now aside from what we could
conceive about in talking about these various fields, let me get right to the
chase about why this meeting tonight was important. This guy, Peter, reminded
me – through the presence of the Holy Spirit I believe – that I was well
knowledgeable and had a gift at communicating to others what I learned and came
to know. He also asked me a question that I never dreamed I’d hear: “Would you
like an opportunity to serve others through the amount of knowledge you have at
a Bible study I run?” I almost couldn’t believe my ears when I heard him ask
this question. It’s the feeling you get sometimes, thinking back as a younger
kid, when you’re hoping so bad that your dad will say yes to you’re wanting to
go spend the night at a friend’s house (for me back then, friends would have
been boys, not girls), and he finally says yes and you’re so happy at his answer
and also wonder - at the same time – if
he’s messing with you or you’re getting set up for something. In other words,
this almost seemed too good to be true.
I was tempted to say, as most of us
Christians would usually say when presented with this kind of an opportunity,
“Yeah sure let me pray about it and get back to you and find out if this is
God’s will or not”. But then again, I remembered that I had been praying about
this for quite a while and had basically surrendered this desire to the Lord
and essentially focused on becoming the person He wanted me to be. And anyone
can pursue that goal in life even if he/she doesn’t get the immediate
opportunity to express his/her spiritual gifts at some capacity. Because our
being able to express our spiritual gifts depend on the right circumstances
lining up and the right people enabling us to have the opportunity; whereas
becoming the person God wants me to be, only depends on me and God.
Anyways, I was (lack for a better
term) thankful that I had met him and given the opportunity to consider
ministering to some people. So we exchanged phone numbers and sometime later he
left.
Before he left though, he told me
several of the nights that they meet to gather for a Bible study of some kind.
One of them, by God’s providence, was Friday evening. That actually is really
the only day of the week in which I’m doing nothing in the evening or late
afternoon! So this was almost perfect.
And interestingly enough, as I was
driving home from Barnes and Noble tonight, I sensed the Lord telling me to
write down the significance of running into that young man which initially
seemed random and insignificant, turned out to be an answer to prayer. Praise
God for so lovingly working out things for our best interest.
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