A few days ago, a warm monsoon breeze blew an old friend’s face across my mind – someone I hadn’t seen in years. I found myself reflecting on a timely kindness she’d extended to me, an encouraging word I'd needed on a difficult afternoon back in our college days.
It was the kind of memory I would’ve liked to express thanks for – we take so many such graces for granted. But I had no current number for her, or email. She and her husband – a wonderful man and an old friend, as well – kept coming to mind off and on all day, but beyond a prayer for the two of them, wherever they might be, there wasn’t much to do but be glad for the echo of memory.
An evening or two later, heading home from a late meeting, I was tired and hungry and craving an apple. On impulse, I pulled into the parking lot of a produce store in my neighborhood that I don’t usually patronize. My phone dinged; I glanced at it impatiently and found an urgent text from a friend.
He was traveling overseas for a ministry opportunity. Nervous about being in a strange place, among unknown people, wondering what to say, wanting to be at his best. It was all crowding in on him, and he was asking, really, for something like the encouragement my other friend had given me, all those years ago.
Reading his message, my mind flickered back to a window seat on a long plane flight, en route to the ominous mysteries of the then-Soviet Union. I was a much younger fellow then, and still new to the widening world. High over the Atlantic, awake in the middle of the night, watching the great darkness go by my small porthole, I wondered what on earth I was doing. I felt like Daniel, being carried to the lion’s den.
On impulse, I fished through my bag, found my Bible, and did what the theologians warn you not to do: opened it at random. No context, no background, no direction. Just my finger, poking Psalm 24:1 …
“The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains.
The world, and those who dwell in it.”
Random or not, the message seemed clear enough to me. Whatever people I was about to meet – whatever situations I was about to find myself in – wherever I landed, behind that great Iron Curtain – it was all in His hands. And doubtless prepared, for His purposes, long, long before.
It was an encouragement I needed, and held onto, in the weeks ahead. So, I passed the same verse on to my friend, hoping it might do as much for him. Then I headed into the grocery, still tired and still hungry and 20 minutes later than I intended.
I found the apples, then sighed as I approached the checkout counter, now 12-deep in people waiting with dozens of items apiece. At that moment, though, some timely soul opened a second line, and I joined the wave of weary customers surging in his direction.
A woman hurried to grab the spot ahead of me, but didn’t make it. Still, the Southern manners kicked in and I stepped aside to wave her on. She glanced up with a smile of thanks, then blinked and did a little double take. “Chris?”
I blinked back. It was the friend I’d been thinking of a few days before – the one I hadn’t seen in years.
Waiting in the checkout line of a store I never shop in, at a time I never shop, in a line I shouldn’t have been in.
Returning her smile of recognition, I caught the whispering Voice in my ear: “The world, and those who dwell in it.”
He knows. He cares. Where we are, where we’re going, whom we’ll meet … what’s coming. How He's planning to use us, to accomplish His purposes, set in motion so long ago.
Here’s to monsoon breezes, apple cravings – and the Lord’s good plans for our lives.
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