Positioning

An opportunity came. It required stepping out and opening my heart back up to something I wasn’t sure was safe or good. And yet if it were, it could be the answer to a prayer I’d once prayed and to little, unrelated prayers I’d prayed along the way. I wasn’t sure I still wanted that answer though or the risk it required, so I sought God in prayer. 

My answer was immediate and evident and came with a certainty I rarely experience; I stepped out.

And what I ended up stepping into was hard. It left me in the same place I’d started but with new pain and insecurity to process. One night I asked God why. I was driving home, and the earnest question rose up in me. I didn’t understand why, and I realized that I could ask God. That He may or may not give me an answer, but that He would hold my question tenderly. 

And that very week He answered me in another (and equally rare) moment of spontaneous clarity: I was positioning you. 

The answer didn’t fill all the gaps of my understanding, but it satisfied the longing for it in my heart. God was purposing me. God was positioning me. God was working for the good of His Kingdom—and maybe for the good of a specific believer—by placing me where He had. And instead of feeling the weight of my pain, I was suddenly overwhelmed by His goodness and favor towards me.

And that was enough for me. Because God was positioning me for good. 

Today (as of writing this) I was sitting in church when a runny nose hit me utterly out of nowhere. And I wasn’t happy about it. The morning seats I’d saved for friends had already gotten confused, and I didn’t want to miss the sermon to get a tissue from the bathroom. But the runny nose wasn’t going anywhere, so I got up. 

On the way back to my seat, I saw a man at the entrance. He approached me, confused why we were midway through the sermon when church wasn’t even supposed to have started yet. He was a visitor, new to the whole area, and had driven half an hour to be there, not knowing we were combining our regular two services into one service that week. 

I told him the sermon today was more topical, and I caught him up on what he’d missed. He asked if I knew where he could find a seat (with a two service church combined into one, the place was packed), and thanks to the seat saving confusion earlier, I had one right beside me. 

I walked him back, I sat with him, I showed him the communion line, I got to hear some of his story. All because of a runny nose. All because God positioned me. 

What looked like inconvenience to me was actually God positioning me for His story. 

What looked like pain to me was actually God positioning me for His story. 

God was inviting me into His work. God was giving me the honor and the privilege of blessing other believers. In what looked negative to me, God was positioning me for His glory. 

That is who we serve. Not a God who causes us pain or inconvenience but a God who invites us into a greater blessing than we can possibly see when the pain or inconvenience are clouding our vision. And a God who is kind enough to open our eyes to His story when we don’t understand.