I Did Not See that Coming
I thought I was prepared to speak to a group of teenage girls for our Youth Girls’ Friendsgiving. I mapped out and rehearsed exactly what I was going to say. However, the night before I was to speak, I was almost involved in a car accident. My mind immediately rushed back to the car crash I was in with my sister the year before. Due to that accident, we both acquired permanent injuries and conditions which continue to affect our everyday lives.
As soon as I got home, I collapsed onto the cold floor of my room and cried. I kept asking God why the accident happened to me and what His plan was in all of it. I didn’t understand why I suffered from the condition I now have. How could He possibly work through someone like me? I wanted answers right then and there. In that moment of desperation, He answered and gave me exactly what I was going to speak about to the girls the next day, and it was not what I had already prepared.
When I walked to the podium the next night and opened my Bible, I simply began with the accident my sister and I were in and what happened to us. I shared how I saw myself as broken and unusable. How I cannot do the things I love anymore because I’m at risk of having a heart attack, even when doing the simplest things. I compared my medical condition to having a membership with benefits. Only my benefits are side effects and triggers.
I knew most of the girls who attended the Friendsgiving, at least on a surface level. For the most part, everyone knew at least someone there, but no one really knew what each girl truly thought of themselves. Some may have also thought of themselves as unworthy, broken, or unusable. But God revealed to me as I was curled up on the floor of my bedroom, that He uses broken people to fulfill His plan. He’s always working everything together for our good, for those who love Him, and for His glory (Romans 8:28).
I used Ruth as an example. She lost her husband, her brother-in-law, and her father-in-law but still chose to remain with and follow her mother-in-law, Naomi, to a foreign land. She was in mourning, yet she trusted God to be with her in her valley of loss. God used Ruth in her brokenness and sorrow to provide for Naomi and herself. Then God provided a kinsman redeemer to marry her and take care of her. She became part of the line of David from which Jesus, the Messiah, came.
It may not seem like God is working and that He’s distant, but He’s always orchestrating every detail beyond our comprehension.
I concluded that night with the parable of the prodigal son. Absorbed with himself and his desires, he asked his dad for his inheritance, moved to a foreign country, wasted it all, and ended up scrounging for food in a pig pen. Sometimes, we feel like that son who lost it all, unable to imagine how we’ll ever escape the pig pen. But, when the son finally came to his senses, he humbled himself and made the decision to return home to become a servant in his father’s house. So he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him (Luke 15:20 ESV).
When we make up our minds to turn back to God, despite our sorrow, shame, and every other label we’ve given ourselves, we are not the ones running to meeting Him. He is the one running to meet us. There is no place God will not go to find and redeem us.
No matter what we think of ourselves, He is always working to draw us to Himself, even when it does not seem like it. Sometimes, it may take wallowing in a pig pen, or on a bathroom floor, before we see the hand of God transforming every aspect of our lives and erasing every negative label we’ve placed on ourselves.
