How Did I Get Here?

One of my goals has been to really sit back and spend more time thinking about where God has placed me. I’m not sure if that is normal to think about or not, but I just don’t think we appreciate the significance of our location. In my case, it just doesn’t make sense where I am. According to Google, I grew up where the population was 62,405 people. Not a bad start, I guess. I spent part of my adult life where the population was 485,153.  It’s not New York, but it’s not bad. You can’t really help where you were born. You can’t really help where the person you fall in love with lives. But when the chance finally came for us to choose where we wanted to live, we chose a place that had a population of 245 people. Let me be clear, not two hundred and forty-five thousand people. Two hundred and forty-five people. We had lots of options, we looked at other places. So why did we end up here? When I was thinking about all these things, it brought me back to some of the challenges I referenced last week. Part of those challenges was me having surgery. I was in a hospital about an hour away from home for around a week. What a lot of people didn’t know at the time was that we had two vehicles, and both were in the shop the whole time I was in the hospital. My wife still made it every single day to visit me. How? The wonderful people that we met living in this beautiful place! I’ve aways thought of myself as a nice person. But you might say that I was nice from a distance. I would always wave at my neighbor; I would greet the mailman. I was even willing to shovel snow in the winter. But drive someone an hour away to visit someone in the hospital? That is a long time in a quiet vehicle, plus you still have the drive back and what if they got bad news at the hospital? When, I think about things like this, I’m forced to ask myself, what was God trying to teach me? In the bible you hear about people needing time to prepare so God sends them into the desert. Is this my desert? Do I have so much to learn that God had to send me to place where I can’t be distracted by people? I’d love to tell you that’s a crazy thought, but I’m afraid it just might be true. When you are surrounded by a lot of people you can either get distracted easily or you can hide easily. I worry that my lesson to learn from all of this is that I can’t hide any longer. I wonder if I’ve been just like the Israelites when they left Egypt. Have I been wandering for forty years? When I look back on all the things I could have been doing over the years, I worry that I did a whole lot of running instead. I’ve talked many times about my love for the book of Jonah, have I been running like him? He decided to run in the opposite direction that God wanted. Have I been trying to hide in a crowd so that God wouldn’t pick me out? When you live in a small town, everyone has to do their part. When someone needs something, everyone helps. I’ve been forced to do things that I have always been uncomfortable trying to do.  I’ve met some of the most amazing people in the world. If I was somewhere else, I never would have had these opportunities. This week at church we are doing our yearly VBS program. The theme this year is “What a Mess”. I was thinking the other day about the kids that are going to be coming to VBS all week. They have their whole life in front of them. Who knows what they are going to see and where all they will go. What messes will we be able to get into ten years from now? My only hope is that we can find a way this week to lay some foundation for these young kids. I want them to be a lot stronger than I ever was. I don’t want to wander anymore. I don’t want to hide anymore. I want to embrace where God has put me and learn the lessons that I have been hiding from. I’m not sure how I got here, but I’m glad that I am here, and I can’t wait to see what’s next!