Life can seem crazy at times, but the underlying truth for every believer is that God is at work in our lives. He is working in things that we call coincidences as well as in the circumstances that clearly reveal His activity. When He brings healing or salvation to someone there is no doubting that He is at work. But, what about the times we are interrupted by an unplanned meeting, or are delayed by a traffic jam?
Romans 8:28 gives us an answer. The New Living Translation puts it this way:
“And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.”
This means, among other things, that when I put my faith in Jesus God begins to work for my good in everything that happens to me. God is causing everything to work for my good—whether or not I understand it at the time.
Harry Emerson Fosdick once pointed out that Whistler, the artist, started out to be a soldier and failed at West Point because he could not pass chemistry. “If silicon had been a gas,” Whistler used to say, “I should have been a major-general.” It is amazing how God can even use our failures to get us where He wants us to go.
Many of us could testify to the fact that our lives have often been shaped by what seemed at the time to be a chance event. Late one evening a professor sat at his desk working on the next day’s lectures. He shuffled through the papers and mail placed there by his housekeeper. He began to throw them in the wastebasket when one magazine—not even addressed to him but delivered to his office by mistake—caught his attention. The magazine fell open to an article titled “The Needs of the Congo Mission.”
As the professor read the article, he was touched by the words, “The need is great here. We have no one to work the northern province of Gabon in the central Congo. And it is my prayer as I write this article that God will lay His hand on one—one on whom, already, the Master’s eyes have been cast—that he or she shall be called to this place to help us.” The professor closed the magazine and wrote in his diary: “My search is over.” He committed the rest of his life to the Congo. The professor’s name was Albert Schweitzer. His life was changed by an article intended for someone else. A coincidence? Hardly.
God’s hand can be seen in our lives if we stop to evaluate those things that we, at first, don’t understand. Isn’t it amazing how many “coincidences” turn out to be God’s guidance? Accidents don’t happen to God’s children. Romans 8:28 reminds me that God is causing everything to work for my good if I love Him and am called to His purpose for my life.
