“It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him.” (Deuteronomy 13:4)
In May of 1991, I asked Jesus to come into my heart. I’ll never forget the sense of joy and peace that came with that decision. I now some sense of hope. Finally, I was beginning to believe that everything was going to turn out okay.
Six weeks later I lost my job. I was one of the last persons to whom you would ever think such a thing would happen.
Even as I write this today, I want to stand up and defend myself because I had been taught if you get a good education, are willing to work a little harder that the next guy, and obey the rules, the sky was the limit. But instead of being on top of the world, I seemed to have ended up on the bottom.
I didn’t deserve the hand that had been dealt to me. And on top of it all, I had just become a Christian. Why would God allow such calamity to continue in my life? I thought I was now one of his own. Is that any way for a father to treat his child?
I knew I would eventually get another job. I had been taught in graduate school that someone is always willing to hire you if you had the right stuff. I was competent and believed that someone out there would recognize that I had a bad break that I didn’t deserve.
Nineteen job announcements later, I ended up in Georgia, 500 miles away from my family and hours away from anyone who loved me. It was at that time I realized that God had me right where he wanted me. I had no other choice but to follow him. He was all I had!
I often to Georgia as my Isle of Patmos. Patmos is a small island in the Aegean Sea where Rome sent its political exiles. The Apostle John’s mention of it in Revelation 1:9 probably means that he was a prisoner, having been sent there by Emperor Domitian in AD 95 for preaching the Gospel.
It was on Patmos where John wrote the Book of Revelation. And it was in Georgia where God first revealed to me the blessings that come when we are obedient to him.
God knew that if I was ever to grow and prosper as a Christian, he had to move me far away from the life I knew, not to mention the life that knew me. No one would have believed the change in me, but in Georgia, I didn’t have to convince anyone. All I had to do was to try to live the life to which I had been called.
God’s Word tells us at Job 36:11, “If they obey and serve him, they will spend the rest of their days in prosperity and their years in contentment”. I am a living and breathing example of what can happen when you get to the point where you have to depend on God, even though I fought him tooth and nail all the way here.
Georgia has been a blessing to me. Yes, God put some distance between me and some of the good things in my life, but he also made sure there was considerable distance between me and some things that were destroying my life. And to top it all off, he put me in a loving, church-going, Bible-believing community. His plan for me was perfect!
So what’s the moral of this story and how can it help you through the problems that you find life bringing your way? We all have hands that we don’t like. Indeed, all of us can remember an Island of Patmos where God placed us so we could learn to trust him.
The truth is it is much easier to look back at God’s plan for our lives that to look ahead to it. But isn’t that the difference between being faithful and faithless? Remember the word of our Lord, “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and curse–the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known”. (Deuteronomy 11:26-28)
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