Just Floating Along God's River

…There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.

 I was in the corner store of our neighborhood the other day, and the clerk, who I have been praying for and periodically witnessing to says to me, “Hey man, I need to tell you something really important.” So I lean in to listen and he says, “You have some special power I wanted to tell you about.” Well, I was flattered, to say the least, but I assured him that I have no special powers. Again he said I did, so I asked him "What is this special power he thought I had?"

So he goes on to remind me of the time about three years ago when I had told him to come outside and look at this painting I had in the back of my pickup truck. It was an old, oil painting that was tearing away from the frame. I had it in the truck because someone had donated some furniture to our transitional housing complex, and we didn’t need any paintings. That day he had mentioned that he was just moving into a new apartment, and it was looking pretty bare. So I asked him if he wanted that painting to spruce up his place a little bit. It was a nice painting. I don’t even recall what it was a painting of, today. But he surely remembers.

He goes on to tell me how he stared at that oil painting for a couple of days, and then decided he would go out and by a canvas and some oil paints. Well as he’s relaying this story to me, grinning from ear to ear, he says, “That was the day I discovered that I had a passion for art.” This guy is about twenty-four or five years old, and was already in college while working at the store, but now he had stumbled upon a new found love. The next semester he enrolls in an art course. He showed me some pictures of his paintings that he has on his cell phone, and this guy is really, really good.

To make a long story short, he believes that I have the power to show people their destinies, or something along those lines. Again I assured him that I have no special power for any of that. But what I did tell him was, every morning when I get up, I pray and ask God to use me however He will that day. And obviously, Jesus wanted to show this guy that He had placed a gift in him that until this day, he wasn’t aware of. Jesus just used me to do it. I told him that God directs people’s steps that are committed to Him, and want to be used to bring Him glory. Sometimes we are aware that God is directing us, most times we are not.

I believe that there is a flow to the moving of the Spirit of God, kind of like a river flows. I believe that when we are plugged in to our Lord through prayer and intimacy, it’s like we are just floating along God’s river. And this makes Jesus very glad. You can’t even imagine what stock I now have to be able to speak into this young man’s life. I now have influence like I never had before. I firmly believe God is up to something in this young man’s life. What do you think?

…To be continued