Introspective Sojourner

My Why statement would be that God might use me to allow someone to feel His love. Which is slightly different from being His hands and feet, both in who gets credit as well as follow through. I have an issue with follow through. My little ADHD brain gets distracted easily, and if it doesn’t, my warped sarcastic sense of humor would surely jump in and muck stuff up.

All my life, as a Christian I’ve been taught to consider where I am as my mission field. God placed me there for a reason. I don’t need to go to Mexico or Africa – there are people right where I am that need to feel God’s love. At one of the churches that I attended our pastor encouraged us to wake up every morning and pray that God would show us how He could use us. Watch for His direction and step out in faith when we felt Him lead us (Pray, Watch, Step). While this sounds great on paper, let me tell you, that is way too many steps for this old girl. There are far too many squirrels in life to distract me, and at one point, this discouraged me.

I have friends that I have prayed about for a very long time. When we put up our new church building, we wrote names that God laid on our hearts on the dry wall before the walls were put up so that they would always be there and prayed over them as a church. Looking back my guess is that when I talked to those friends about Jesus, I did more harm than good. When I’m intentional – somehow it doesn’t work out for me the way I might hope. It’s not a bad practice. It’s a great practice even, for some people.

But God knew how He created me. He knew I’d wander off and say something sarcastic at just the wrong moment because it struck me as funny, and I didn’t think it through. Execution has never been my strong suit. I have great ideas, but my results usually don’t resemble what I intended – even with my words. God knows exactly how to use all my mess ups; all my miscommunications and distractions.

I have a lot of long-time friends; school, Navy, work, various churches. As I have reconnected with old friends over the last few years, what I am finding out is that the moments where God breathed His love into their lives through me, I barely remember. They’re moments when I was just being me, not even being mindful of God. They’re moments I would look at and say, “Of course I did that.” I can’t imagine not doing that.

And that’s the point. God knew.

God knew I wouldn’t even imagine not doing that in that moment. He knew what that friend needed and maybe hadn’t even communicated to me. One of my friends was diabetic and we didn’t even know. I just knew when she needed to eat, she really needed to eat. And since I was in charge of lunch schedules, I worked around that. I can’t imagine not doing that. I wasn’t trying to be kind or thoughtful – it just was the only thing to do.

I can’t take credit for any of those moments I’ve learned about recently, because it wasn’t me. It was how God designed me. I couldn’t mess it up. He didn’t need a plan B, because He wired me to do what I needed to do to show His love. He had a plan and I got to breathe His love into that friend without even being aware it was important.

I’m sure even my children, if asked, would point out moments that I would never think of. And they’ve forgotten all those moments I thought I was rocking that “Mom” thing. That’s how God has used this weird brain and really warped sense of humor of mine. He planned all of it, long before those moments arrived, and planted what I needed in my very DNA. All I ever needed was to love Him and want others to know His love the way I do.

So don’t worry if you feel like you didn’t make a difference the way you thought you were supposed to. God doesn’t have a Plan B. His plan was always going to work, and you might never even notice that it happened.

By Vicki L. Pugliese