Sunday, December 16, 2007

God Changed the Rules


Fifty two years ago, in the movie “A Man Called Peter,” the Rev. Peter Marshall said to his wife: “Katherine, the Lord puts a desire in our hearts and then he fulfils it.” I paid attention to what he said, and God has done exactly that for me all my life. I was accepted into all the graduate programs I had desired, all the churches in which I desired to be their pastor, the clinical programs I wanted, and the exact university I wanted to teach in. I was selected for the Peace Corps. I met and married the perfect wife after only two dates and after seeing her in a dream. All the opportunities seemed impossible at first and all supernatural when they happened.

I decided to write this post today because I realize that after all these years, God changed the rules. Five years ago, as I was retiring from both the university and from the church, people were asking me, “Now what?” And for the first time in my life, I did not know. However, life happened: One day my wife said, “Look what I found in the paper, they are starting the first Tai Chi classes for seniors at the Senior Center.” So off I went, hardly knowing what Tai Chi was.

The next important chapter post-retirement, was attending a conference at Morningstar Ministries on learning to use the new media in spreading the Gospel. The folks from Charisma Magazine taught us about blogging. I had never heard of blogging. I came home and started my first Christian blog. In a short while, my local Republican party heard about my blogging and said, “Hey, we need you to blog to counteract the very active local blog on the Left. So, I started political blogging.

As always a very active person, it would be hard to admit that I was aging. As I look back now, I can see how, without me being aware, the Lord was fixing it so I did not have to deal with limitations. He knew I had to stop the pounding of my 10 K races. So, he dangled in front of me something I had hardly heard of, Tai Chi–the perfect exercise for one as they age. Secondly, He knew it was stressful to be supply preaching all over the place, so he slipped me into a ministry from my easy chair–blogging. He knew it was getting harder to handle all my volunteer work, traveling all over, so he gave me a community action work to do while settled in my warm, cozy home. Not one of these activities had I known about before so that I could desire them. God is so good!!

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