Weekly e-news December 6, 2019
Hey, everyone!
Hope you’re having the crispiest of days, with Christmas spirit filling your heart…
something warm filling your tum…
and songs of tidings of comfort and joy filling your home or car…
but at least your ears and mind!
Christmas-y December reminded me that I had the craziest experience 'bout this time a year or so ago…
Well, actually, I DIDN’T have it!
I wasn’t there when it didn’t happen.
It was kind of an unexperience!
But lots of people apparently thought I was having it!
I was the only one who didn’t know it wasn’t happening to me!
Everyone else thought it was.
But it WASN’T!
I just didn’t know that…
(Whoa.)
Lemme explain…
So, when you volunteer at the Morgan County Correctional Facility…
(or “MCCX”, as it’s affectionately called)…
you have to sign in the volunteer book before you go through the X-ray machines and get the ol’ “pat-down”
(They wind up knowing you better than you know yourself!)
Then you go through three steel doors in 100 yards or so before you’re in and heading down to where we have classes. The sidewalk to the “compound” is about a 1/2 mile…
(Not a full one. And it’s not green.)
Then, when you’re leaving the prison after class, you always have to check out and sign out of the volunteer book and tell Joel, the guard at the front desk, “I’m gone, Joel! Headin’ down the mountain! See you next week!”
Well, turns out that as I was leaving after my class…at about 4:40 in the afternoon or so…I just said, “See ya!” to Joel and didn’t sign out of the book.
Just forgot.
So then, at about 7:30 they realized that I hadn’t signed out!
EVERY volunteer has to be out by 8:00 every night…
And that night, there was the possibility of an unaccounted-for volunteer still inside!!
So they started looking and looking!
For me!
When he told me about it the next week, Joel made it seem like they almost had to lock the whole place down!
“Where is that dude!?”
Maybe somebody started to think of all the scary possibilities of every bad thing that could have happened! I guess, eventually when they didn’t find me anywhere, they must have concluded, “I reckon he just forgot to sign out on the book when he left this afternoon…”
In the meantime, I had no idea that I almost sent the biggest prison in our state into a crisis!
If they knew where to look, they would’ve found me on my couch with my bride, watching the ballgame!
When I heard about it the next week, I realized that it was one of the wildest experiences I had never had!
Because “the night I was lost in MCCX” I wasn’t even there at the time!
I didn’t even know it wasn’t happening!
I know there is a lesson for me in this…
Because Paul tells us that our God makes all of our experiences…
and even our unexperiences!…
”work together” and weave together into a perfect plan for our good!
This is what his letter to the Romans, chapter 8, verse 28 says!
“…And we know that God causes all things to work together for our good!…”
The very next verse says that this “good” is that He is making us like Jesus!…
”…all things work together for our good…that we might be conformed to the image of His Son…” (Romans 8:28-29)
So, everything that happens to you…
and the things that don’t happen to you...
even if everybody but you thinks they are happening to you
and you’re the only one who doesn’t know they’re not!...
is part of a perfect plan!
“How did this unexperience fit into God’s plan for me?”
I have no idea!
But, on the other hand, I almost never DO know how He makes everything work together for my good!
I’m not smart enough to know!
But He is!
And even if I don’t know how He is going to make everything fit into a perfect plan…
He does!
Now the next tim…
Wait a sec!
If the point of everything is making us more and more like Jesus, I can think of one verse where I was like Him the other night, without knowing it…
Mark 1:37…
“…They all went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: ‘Everyone is looking for you!’ “
Bam.