God Showed Up Anyway

Sunday is usually my favorite day of the week. I get up before anyone else in my house, get ready, and get out the door to the church building. I try to shut myself in my office for a few hours before services, review my sermon, pray, and prepare to preach. I’m not superstitious, but this routine has proven effective through the years and routines are normally a good thing for me.

But, sometimes routines get interrupted. This past Sunday, everything that could go wrong went wrong. Because of a whole comedy of errors, I didn’t arrive in my office early, but late. I did not have quiet time to contemplate and pray over my sermon. Instead, my morning had been filled with frustration and chaos (To save them from being blamed, none of this was the fault of my wife or kids). Some of the problems were my fault, some were the fault of others, but regardless of blame, everything seemed to be working against me.

But, it wasn’t just against me. Our set-up crew was plagued with random frustrations. Just as they had overcome all of their obstacles (which included, I kid you not, busted water hoses and a horse trough) and our worship team was beginning to prepare for our outdoor worship service, rain began to fall. We made a quick decision to move worship indoors including moving our baptism indoors. We filled the baptistry, postponed service half an hour, and the set-up team moved everything from the parking lot to the sanctuary. The sound in our overflow area wouldn’t work so we had to move everyone into the sanctuary at the last minute and try to socially distance as best as we could.

I couldn’t remember the name of the person I was baptizing (she had to remind me of her last name), the water was freezing, and I even managed to interrupt service at the wrong time to try to perform the baptism too early (Sloan, my 7 year old, helpfully told me that what I needed was a script to keep that from happening in the future, “Daddy, I know how it goes, one song, then baptism, then another song, then the sermon, then two more songs. I’ll help you next time…” I told him that I had a script and still managed to mess up).

I walked out of the baptistry, waited for the first song to finish, then performed the baptism and got changed out of my waders to preach. I later learned that as our senior adult pastor stepped to the podium to read scripture and pray, he dropped the microphone off of the stage. My iPad refused to display my sermon as I walked up to preach.

I was some sort of miserable.

Nothing went according to plan.

Except, the one thing that mattered the most.

Nothing went according to my plan, but God showed up anyway.

It turns out that God is not dependent upon my routine. Nothing went the way I planned it, but we still celebrated a changed life through baptism. Nothing went the way I planned it, but two families still joined our church. Nothing went according to my plan, but the Holy Spirit still filled our worship. Nothing went the way I planned it, but God wasn’t waiting for me.

Sometimes in the middle of our mess is the perfect time for God to show up and blow our minds. Is your life spinning out of control today? Has everything gone wrong? Fear not, God is not surprised and his hands are not tied. Turn your eyes toward heaven, it may just be that as you are losing control, God is taking over. God didn’t need me to be in control to do great things. He doesn’t need you to be in control either. But we desperately need to be in his control.

I pray that you may have a day like I had–the kind of bad day that is a good day anyway because when everything else went wrong, God showed up anyway!

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash