God works in spooky ways

Yesterday I went to church and as I studied a passage I thought to myself that it would lend itself well to today’s Words for the Day posting. Later that afternoon out of the blue I got an email from a reader and it was a reader submission for consideration to be published in WFTD. That is not unusual in itself as I occasionally receive various items of interest for inclusion in Words for the Day. Sometimes I include them and sometimes I do not.

What distinguished the one I received yesterday was that it was about the “exact” same Scripture that I had decided that morning to write about today. How spooky is that?

As you may or may not know, I rarely plan what I am going to write about each day and it generally just comes to me whenever I sit down to write. Occasionally however it will be something I observe or think about from the day before as in this case, but more often than not, I simply rely upon whatever God is laying upon my heart that particular morning. So if you ever think that I am writing a particular WFTD specifically about you, or that a particular message is just the message that you needed to hear, perhaps God is leading me to do just that on your behalf.

At any rate I took this incident not to be a coincidence rather a confirmation that this passage might have some special meaning to someone out there and needed to be published. We all need to think about the core message in this reader’s submission, so enjoy.


This Sunday’s gospel reading was one familiar to even the most casual Christian The Prodigal Son. Luke’s verses tell the story of a young man who demands his due inheritance of a father who was still quite alive and prospering well.

As the story goes, the son’s request is obliged, only to have the allocated riches quickly lost to a life of debauchery, rich with prostitutes and drunken malaise. In a moment of clarity, coming to him only as he realizes that pigs he attends eat better than he, the son returns home, hoping for his father’s mercy requesting only the privileges of the farm’s lowliest servants.

Instead of rejecting him or assigning him to the fields, the father is overcome with joy and orders the killing of the fatted calf for a celebration. “My son was lost,” he says, “but now he is found.”

That word lost resonated for me this morning and pressed the weekend’s end to its beginning, to a drive home from work Friday that was longer than normal delayed by an unanticipated chore. The day’s added labor came in the form of a ride for a stranded motorist. As I approached her, certain things became obvious, like the fact that her car was most definitely out of service, tucked deeply onto the road’s shoulder, with flashing tail lights.

What wasn’t so obvious was what scripted me in. A drenching rainstorm had just passed, and the side of the roadway was a muddy quagmire. Still, the helpless driver had apparently opted to walk versus wait her way to safety. By the time I rolled by, she had made it over a hundred feet. Traffic was Friday evening slow, but still steady enough to have had 20 30 cars pass her by.

There must have been more to the story, no? Certainly, someone must have stopped and offered assistance a ride, a phone call, something no?

“No,” she told me as she pulled herself into my truck. Passing cars had shared only splashes that left her drenched. Thanking me and apologizing for her asthmatic wheezing, she was a dirty, trembling mess.

A selfish sense of pride in my gallantry lasted only a moment, quickly replaced my another emotion sadness.

How lost have we become as one another’s keepers to allow a scene like this one to play out? Character, I often remind my young son, is what you do when no one is watching. It is doing the right thing when no one would ever know if you didn’t.

But on this stage car after car, was watching watching one another watching themselves and watching the stranded motorist her in their rear view mirrors and, despite the witnessing watch, they drove on.

How pitiful a statement this is regarding our care for the least of our brothers, much less our ability to love as we are loved. How lost we have apparently found ourselves in these ways.

Maybe if the distressed maiden had been a twenty-something-year-old-Brittany-type, delayed from a red carpet somewhere, instead of an obese, divorced mother of two on her way to night school, decisions might have been made differently. Maybe if it weren’t well into a Friday evening, maybe if the week hadn’t been so long and travel so tiring she would have been side saddled in any one of a dozen cars ahead of me. Maybe.

But those maybes weren’t the case. So like that old western lullaby encouraged, one-by-one steel horse cowboys (and cowgirls) yippie-eie-yie-yay’ed by, comfortably categorizing the woman’s misfortune hers alone certainly none of their own.

The question of what Jesus would have done is contemplated easily enough. He answered it for us too many times to count with lepers, road side Samaritans and crucified convicts on his left and right.

“Take my hand.” he would say, “Come with me, and I will make you safe.”

In my congregation’s worship routine, we pray (twice) for our Lamb of God to have mercy on us, and then for Him to grant us peace.

How much more peace would we be granted, I wonder, if we extended to others the same sort of mercy we demand granted ourselves?


Luke 10:27 — “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Mathew 25:40 “And the king will say to them in reply, Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least of my brothers of mine, you did for me.”