God Uses the Stupid Things

Perhaps the most stupid bumper sticker I ever saw, with the possible exception of the one that reads, "Bumper Sticker" is the one that reads, "Everywhere I Go, There I Am." Well duh. At least that is what I used to think.

Yesterday, I took the day off. I left on a personal road trip early in the morning and returned a little before bedtime. I was feeling as though my life had run into a dead end. As I shared that with my loving wife, she suggested I get out of Santa Maria for a road trip (three times). She knows I usually return from those times in a better frame of mind.

I had one mission the Lord wanted me to accomplish in Santa Barbara so I headed south. Having accomplished that, I continued south. My mind was running over a few of the people I knew in Ventura. The name of a pastor came to mind. As I thought about it, it has been almost exactly 34 years since we had seen each other. He lost his wife of 40+ years to cancer this year. I ended up stopping by his house and we talked and prayed together for half an hour or so.

Since I had no agenda and no timetable, I could head any direction from there. Well, I would not have gone very far west since Ventura is a beach city (for those of you in other parts of the world). State Highway 33 heads north from Ventura, through Ojai and down to connect with Highway 166 between Cuyama and Maricopa. From Ojai it is a lonely, winding, desertish road that heads up to Pine Mountain pass just over 5,000 feet above sea level before heading down to the thriving metropolis of Ventucopa, population 92--according to the sign on the highway.

Somewhere between the mountain pass and Ventucopa, it dawned on me that it did not really matter where I went, I would still be there. I did not even have time to get the "Well duh" out when the following thought rushed in. Nothing is ever going to be right until I am right.

The reason I even needed the road trip is because I had been a little self-absorbed. I felt as though my life had hit a dead end. What I had long wanted to do is not working at this point. Without that working, I did not see how God is going to accomplish any greater good through my life. It mostly seems like I am just spinning my wheels. My real problem at the time was, I could not even find anyone else to blame.

Sometime I might yet write the book, "The 8 Faces of Pride." The Holy Spirit gave me that title over twenty years ago. I still do not even know what all eight of them are. One of them, however, is what Charles Shoemake at LIFE Bible College taught me many years ago as, "the pride of the worm." That is the one represented in the previous paragraph. We might sum it up as, "It is all about poor me." I have no doubt some of you had already counted the "I, me, and mys" in that paragraph and figured it out so that is for the rest of us.

To wrap this up, as I was whining to the Lord about the dead end that was all I could see, He reminded me of Jeremiah 29:11, "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope." I was still meditating on that when I arrived home. I opened my email to see a message with a sermon attached entitled, "God Has a Plan for You." The first person to mount the platform after worship at church this morning started what she had to say by quoting Matthew 6:25, "Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?" Does anyone else see a pattern here? It only takes me two or three times hearing the same thing in different ways to get a message. Well, that is usually all it takes. I will let you know when this all resolves. God bless.