His timing, His plan

 

You grab your bag and rush out the door, jump into the car and get it started. You buckle up and fly up the driveway, turn right at the stop sign, left at the weird neighbor’s house, another right and, to your dismay, there is a turtle in the middle of the road.

We have all been there. Your late for work or some activity, and you just want to get going, but that darn turtle is in the way. He’s moving too slow, and you hop out of the car to move him.

Don’t! Don’t touch the turtle! Wait for it to cross.

No, this did not just turn into a “save the turtles” article. The kind of turtle I am talking about is a metaphorical turtle. The “turtle” in this case, is a delay that keeps you from getting to point A to point B as fast as possible.

As annoying as turtles are, they can be used by God to put you exactly where you need to be, when you need to be there, and even save your life.

In the past few weeks, God has put many turtles in our way, and they saved us from getting into several horrible accidents, two of which I am going to tell you about.

It was 3:30 p.m. and we were rushing out the door to get to my piano lesson on time. We got there on time, but my lesson ran over about 15 minutes. Mom wasn’t too happy about it, because she wanted to get to the store to get some stuff for dinner that night. When I finally got out, mom rushed off toward the store. When we reached a major intersection, there were Cop lights, ambulances and fire trucks lining the road, and blocking the only entrance to the parking lot. As we drove by, we saw what had happened. There were two cars, one was completely flipped over, and one was badly banged up. We could tell that the crash happened with in the past few minutes, because police officers and EMT’s were still arriving, and a roadblock was being set up. That could have been us. If my piano lesson had not run those few extra minutes over, we might have been in the middle of that crash. Dinner was leftovers, but we were never more thankful.

The next incident happened while we were going to a homeschool activity. We had lost track of time and were running late. On top of that, our neighbor asked us to get her mail for her. She lived two or three miles down the road, in the opposite direction that we needed to go. Now running even more late than before we drove down the road, very annoyed that we might miss the first part of our activity. We were just driving along, when a Pickup truck who was a little way ahead of us stopped in the road, seemingly for no reason. Mom stopped, just in time I might add, and got out. In the road ahead of us was a huge tractor trailer truck, on its side laying across the road. More people stopped behind us, and an EMT arrived, and a few moments later the police. We had to turn around and make a detour that would take us even longer, but we didn’t even care, we were all just thanking God for our neighbor asking us to do what seemed at the time as a petty little chore but turned into a possibly lifesaving event. And what’s more, we arrived for our activity at exactly the right time! We had left late, gone out of our way to get our neighbor’s mail, took a longer detour AFTER sitting on the road for 10 minutes, and still arrived at exactly 3:16, one minute after the activity was scheduled.

Okay so, I think I have made the point that turtles can be a good thing.

People these days are always in a rush. From one thing to another, back and forth, in again out again, without stop. Move, move, move, rush, rush, rush.

We as human beings need to learn how to sit back and enjoy the ride. How to just relax and say, “it's okay.” Take a breath, sit down, don’t rush.

I mean, be honest with yourself here, would it really be that bad if you were 5 minutes late to work?

I know some activities have a limited amount of time. My piano lessons are only half an hour long, and sometimes I can’t even finish everything I had to do that week, but those are the times when we feel rushed, but need to realize that God is in control and that it’s all in His hands and His timing.

So next time you're rushing to get somewhere, and your coffee takes extra-long to heat up, someone asks you to do a pointless task, or you overslept, just remember that God has a specific plan for that day, and that you should just go with the flow. Take a deep breath, thank God for your day and wait for those turtles to pass.

I will leave you with this verse from Isaiah 55:8:

 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”