The best laid plans...

I’d like to think God has a sense of humor. After all, we are created in His image and we have a sense of humor (at least most of us). Besides, how else can you explain giraffes, elephants, and cheerleaders?

I have this scene that plays in my head from heaven. It actually starts here on earth with us. We start most days with a plan and a pretty good idea of how things are going to go for the day. What meetings we will be attending, who we will talk to, what project we need to get done, etc. God also has a plan for how our day will go; only His plan is a little more accurate than ours and sometimes He does not give us a lot of notice regarding His plan. So here’s the scene, God’s up in heaven and He calls all the angels together and He says, “Hey, ya’ll watch this.” And then He proceeds to introduce something into our day that turns everything upside down. Ever been there?

I got up this morning with a plan. We were going to spend the day training some pastors, teachers, etc. on how to use of Source of Light materials with their organization. My part was easy. I was going to deliver a 30-minute mini-sermon which I spent the previous night putting together (which was if I might say so myself very good) to the group.

Before training, we had to stop by the court house because some of the workers had been stealing things from our ministry center and they were in jail and the case was proceeding and Halie, our director, needed to meet with the prosecutor. Halie comes out of the meeting and says he has to come back at 2:00 that day. I say, “That’s impossible, who’s going to do the training this afternoon?” He looks at me and says, “You do it.” So my talk suddenly went from 30-minutes to 3 hours! Have I mentioned that I have never done this type of training before. And to make matters worse, everything was in Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia. All the materials were in Amharic and I was supposed to spend 3 hours talking about them and I don’t understand one word. Can you say panic!

To make a long story short, I had some of the material on my computer in English that I was able to use and I had an incredibly good beyond words afternoon teaching a group of incredibly committed men and women how to disciple the people in their organization.

So my day didn’t go as planned, in this case, it went better than planned.