lifeasmission

Little Promptings

January 24, 2012

If I had to isolate the discipline that God has been helping me to cultivate the most over the last year it would be to discern the voice and prompting of the Holy Spirit in normal, everyday, life.  Truth be told, this has been hard.  I’m busy (like everyone else), I’m easily distracted (like everyone else), and (just like everyone else) rather than receiving the reality that God is present and active in all aspects of my day and life, I have a propensity to isolate God to just certain spheres.  To make matters worse, actually hearing and responding to God’s voice and prompting is seldom clearcut.  It’s often something you do without ever knowing for sure if what you heard was really God’s voice or if how you responded was actually the most appropriate decision.

Today, however, was not one of those times. Today was clear as a bell.

I took just returned from taking the car in for a quick oil change.  Plenty to do today, so I wanted to get in and out quick.  However, as I walked in, there was an older lady in front of me who was distraught over learning that a major part on her car had gone bad and that the car was going to be virtually undriveable unless she got it fixed.  This wasn’t just a problem of convenience for her, though it was that.  Apparently, she shares this car w/ her daughter who relies on it to get to work.  More than convenience, it seemed that replacing this part was going to be a huge financial hurdle.  As the store manager walked back out to the shop so that she could call her husband on the store phone, I heard her describe how they would need to post-date a check and check with their landlord about either being late or needing to fall short on their monthly payment. In short, this unexpected repair was a major challenge on a couple different fronts and she was obviously beside herself with frustration and worry.

Enter prompting.

As I sat in the tiny waiting area and pretended not to listen, I felt like God was prompting me to make a major contribution toward this lady’s repair costs.  I can say with relative certainty that this was God, because believe me, I am at no loss for the many different things that we could be doing with our finances  Then the internal dialogue kicked in.  You can probably imagine it.  Is this really God’s voice?  How much should I contribute?  How would I even explain myself?  Should that money go somewhere else?  Does it need to be accompanied by some sort of explanation?  You get the point.  In the end, however, I decided it was God’s voice, settled on an amount, and once the lady had decided to leave the car there and accept a ride home from one of the shop workers, I simply asked the store manager to apply a portion of her repair cost to my bill.  He was stunned, but happy to do so.

20 minutes later as I retuned home, still wondering if I had heard and responded faithfully, I received an email from my wife Amy.  She was forwarding another email that she had just received (no kidding – at pretty much exactly the same time I was settling up at the auto shop!) from our new childcare giver, Jean.  Here is Jean’s email…

Hello Amy,

Hope you are well today, and that Aubrianna is doing well.

Will you consider yesterday and next Mondays child care as a gift from me as part of my stewardship?

This means that I do not want to be paid for either days.

I am happy to be partnering with you for The Kingdom.

Have a blessed day, Jean

Jean’s gift to us was nearly an exact match to the contribution I felt like God had prompted me to make to the lady in need at the auto shop!

Wish I could say that listening and responding to God’s little promptings was always that clear cut, but the truth is that that’s not the case.  It’s a cool story for sure, but at the heart of it is something more profund – the realization of what we just might be missing out on if we fail to attempt to pay attention to what God might be saying at all.

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