A beautiful sixty-something woman made her way to the microphone to lead the closing prayer today in West Plains, Missouri, where I was speaking at a ladies seminar. She paused before praying to comment on the the Providence of our great God, about which I’d been speaking. She reminisced about the early days of her marriage, when Providence found the newlyweds in a hotel room en route to an off shore assignment with which her husband had been tasked, early in his career. At the end of the hotel stay, her husband picked up the Gideon Bible from the hotel desk and placed it in their car.
“What kind of man have I just married?” she thought….”What kind of man steals a Bible?”
A few days later, while her husband found himself waiting in the car for a tugboat to come and transport him to the job, he picked up the “stolen” Bible and began to read. Just at the right time, an elder in the church of the Lord passed by the car. Glancing in the window, he noticed the young man reading the Bible. As any good soldier does, the elder engaged the young man in conversation about the Word. He basically asked the question asked by Philip two thousand years ago of the Ethiopian journeyman in Acts 8: “Do you understand what you are reading?”
The rest, as they say, is history. I guess the tugboat came to pick him up, but that was just incidental when compared to the rescue of the spiritual lifeboat that day. Lo, these many years later, this sweet woman, baptized along with her husband, as a result of reading from the “stolen” Bible, led our feasting souls in prayer at the conclusion of our study on how to be beautiful women for Him.
Story after story comes my way about how people learn the gospel by “chance.” In fact, I am convinced that, for souls who are seeking, there is Providence; not a miraculous nudging or a better-felt-than-told mystical experience. But, when people are seeking—when they are opening up the Bible and looking for His Will—there are often still people who are praying for opportunities to interact with those seekers. Our God is powerful enough to orchestrate His Providence in uniting teachers with students and bringing seekers to those who can facilitate understanding.
I pray that He is doing that with our Digging Deep study. I am praying hard that, as we explore His supreme authority, He is bringing open hearts together with open Bibles in sweet circumstances that can bring souls to an ultimate place around His throne. I hope you can be with us for the first podcast of this year’s study. It’s tomorrow night at 7 p.m. CST here: https://livestream.com/whcoc/for-women. If you can’t make it live, shoot for watching the archived edition. Either way, if you could be praying about the digging, the hearts, and the receptivity to the power of the Word, Emily Anderson, who joins me tomorrow night, and I will be so thankful. Blessings till then!
P.S. If you’d still like to get in on the study, there’s plenty of time to catch up! September’s portion can easily be combined with October’s and you’ll be right with us by the end of the month. We’d love to have you studying along.
