December 20, 2021 – Click here to listen
Recently a spate of my newer friends have found out about my book, Miracle on Luckie Street, and have begun reading it and/or have watched the video of my testimony given at all three services at First Baptist Church Orlando several years ago, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_O9rA-uJdI). Yesterday a young man who was like a son to me growing up from knee-high to about six foot four and becoming a very successful business person today, sent me a photo.
That proves that God has a great sense of humor even in times of great peril. The photo shows the intersection that I came to when I hitch-hiked into Atlanta. It was the intersection of Fairlie and Luckie Street downtown Atlanta. At the time it was a seedy section of town by the bus station and many homeless street people such as winos, drug addicts, and the like were located there.
I was wanted by the police in New Orleans for serious offenses and after being tipped off that the police were sweeping the French Quarter where I lived trying to find me to arrest me, I fled to Atlanta to escape. I was addicted to meth and was an alcoholic, and had more dysfunctional problems than Bayer has aspirins, and pretty much had reached a point where suicide looked like my only option.
When I arrived downtown Atlanta I looked up at those street signs and snorted, Fairlie Luckie huh? I hadn’t been lucky even for a moment my entire life. What I didn’t know was that God was preparing to perform a miracle in my life and Fairly Lucky turned out to be a huge understatement of the transformation that would occur.
Most of you have read my book or listened to my testimony or read about it in Words for the Day, so I won’t rehash it now, but I endured a devastating car wreck a few weeks after I got there and very nearly died. While in recovery I read the Bible to disprove it and I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior and He radically changed my life forever. As it turned out it was indeed “Fairlie Luckie” that I went to Atlanta even though I suffered terribly breaking many bones in my body and was taken to the very brink of death and then enduring a year of painful recovery. I was wonderfully saved and I thank God every day for it.
As I thought about that photo yesterday all of that came back to me. God foreknew what would happen and I will never be convinced that He doesn’t have a sense of humor that he demonstrated through bringing me to those particular streets that day. For those of you who don’t think God has a sense of humor, keep in mind that from the very beginning, we were created in God’s image. What an immense honor it is to have the features of God, to be like Him. Thus if we have a sense of humor, then the One who created us has a sense of humor as well.
I was reading Jeremiah again this morning and God instructed him to put on yokes to symbolize that God had given the people of Judah over to bondage to King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. Apparently, a few false prophets were urging the Jewish nation not to submit. Jeremiah warned they would be destroyed if they resisted telling them, “Do not listen to them; serve the king of Babylon and live! “. God was still being merciful and warning them even as he was preparing to put them in captivity to punish them for disobeying His commands and living the evil life they had been living for years.
God’s punishment was going to be severe and they would be taken into bondage for 70 years because of their dark sins against Him, but He was still merciful and did not want to see them perish. It reminds me of punishing my kids when they disobeyed me or their mother. I still loved them but realized they had to be disciplined in order to learn.
God is merciful and I don’t think He wants to punish us any more than we want to punish our children. We do it for their own good and so does God, my friends. He knew that I needed to suffer for my sins so I would come to my senses and quit running away from Him and start galloping towards Him.
Today I love Him more than words can express and I truly appreciate the lengths that He went through to save me. I don’t feel so much “lucky” as I feel blessed, but I recognize what He was telling me with the street signs. One of the many advantages He enjoys is knowing the outcome and I feel sure that He chuckled as He watched me glance at those signs and snort, not knowing what He was preparing to do in my life.
God has a great sense of humor. The Bible contains as much wit and comedy as any sitcom or late-night show — but in a way that God still communicates important messages through the laughter. Praise His name and His laughter!
Psalm 126:2
Then our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with joyful songs. Then the nations said, “The LORD has done spectacular things for them.” The LORD has done spectacular things for us. We are overjoyed.