Saturday, February 9, 2013

A seemingly random encounter with a stranger


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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