It was to be a busier-than-usual sabbath. There was music practice at 8:30 am, church service at 10 am, meeting my sister-in-law and her husband, visiting hospice to see a friend, helping my brother-in-law drop off his car at the shop, going to a nursing home to pray with an elderly mom of a buddy, trying to catch lunch somewhere in the midst of all of this and returning to watch a video we’d had been eager to absorb.
While church went as planned, nothing else did. My sister-in-law wasn’t home when we arrived. The friend in hospice wasn’t in the hospital we struggled to get to (he had just been transferred) and there was an outbreak of influenza at the nursing home that had just been discovered before we got there and so we weren’t able to get up to the elderly woman’s floor.What happened instead…It was a beautiful spring day and we were able to sit outside on the nursing home patio and catch some quality time with our friend and were able to pray with him on behalf of his mom. When we left, we went over my mother-in-law’s house, ordered pizza, chicken parmigiana and devoured some homemade minestra and a huge antipasto. Five Stars, absolutely!At the end of this circuitous day, my mother-in-law, who has had some serious physical challenges, smiled and looked at me and said, “I had a lot of fun today.”It was as if God himself was summarizing his reaction to my life that hasn’t exactly gone the way I planned.
PORTAL TO HEAVEN: Seeing God’s hand in the unexpected is to be expected.
You don’t know where the wind blows. And you don’t know how a baby grows in its mother’s womb. In the same way, you don’t know what God will do—and he makes everything happen.
Ecclesiastes 11:5 ERV