Another Beggar

Later, Sunday, when I was driving over to the pick-up baseball game with our youth group, I tried to go straight down 30th Ave N to 34th St N, and then turn left to pick up 22nd Ave N and go right all the way down to the Park. It is not my usual route and the Lord prevented me from taking it:

I am the kind of driver who doesn't like to wait for a red light: that's fumes I'm burning that are ruining my fuel efficiency (this comes from the assertion that all the energy burned while remaining motionless is wasted). So, when God let the car in front of me stand on its brakes throughout the green, I just moved around him and turned left at 28th St N instead, which is my normal route. (Funny thing is, just as I turned, he looked up and drove on.)

So I said to God, "Well, I don't know why You had me take this route, but I guess I'll be finding out."

Sweetbay, a local grocery chain, has a location at 22nd Ave and 34th St N. I would never have entered it from the other direction, because it is on the corner opposite the turn I would have been trying to make. But now, the opening was parallel to me and much easier to access. That is why it made sense to me when God suggested that I stop in to get some Gatorade for the team.

So I did, not knowing why, because I am out of Gospel Tracts for a while, as my time with Team Hope draws to a close and thus I no longer carry around the tract box in my car. So I thought I had a fruitless venture into the store. Get ready for more of these, I gloomily thought.

But then, the Lord showed me why I should never assume.

As I was exiting onto 34th St to make a left (coming from the opposite direction than the route I had originally thought to take), I saw a panhandler with his sign standing in the hot sun, plying his "trade." The Lord said to me, "It's hot out there. I think he might like a Gatorade."

"Hmm...good idea," I thought, as I rummaged my car for a tract. The only one I could see was underneath my driver's seat and it was hard to reach with my two fingers in that tight space. But, I prayed hard, "Lord, give me this tract!" and He did. And the man did appreciate the drink in that heat. And he got a Gospel tract, too.

It wasn't a random act of kindness: it was a Sovereign act of Grace. And I got to play the obedience role.

Now imagine how I would have missed out, if I had told God how to run my life? Or if I had taken the route that I had planned to, anyway, inspite of the man in the car in front of me who didn't move for just long enough to get me to turn?

Atheists insist that God doesn't exist. Well, I hope this serves as just one more testimony that they are wrong. I just hope they don't end up dead wrong.