I am unlikely as far as Christians go. That is, if you had looked at my early life, you would not have imagined I would ever step anywhere near a church, let alone belong to one, let alone praise the Lord for the kind of life I'm living.
But here I am, 40 years on, and I don't just praise God; I point others toward God. I take God into the dark places of the world and whisper Him in the quiet places and shout Him in the loud ones and have been called to do His work in a way that I never could have imagined looking in the mirror.
And every time I think about where I am and how far I've come and how much hope I have for the future and what an absolute miracle my life is, I'm blown away by the realization that God chose me for this. God chose me for this long before I ever chose Him, and He's been guiding my steps through all the hard places to come to this one. That doesn't mean that somehow, I've reached an easy place, but that I recognize that the place where I am right now is exactly the place God has for me...
...the place He's had for me since before I knew there was a place for me at all.
This is how God works. This is how God has always worked.
He chooses us long before we choose Him, and He plans out some of the cool things that we're going to get to do long before we even think about doing cool things, and there's something beautiful in the way our lives are going before we ever understand there's anything beautiful at all.
Flashback to the book of Acts:
There's a young Pharisee named Saul who applauds the persecution of these new Christian folks, who aren't even called Christians yet. He prides himself on defending the name of the Lord and fighting for the law and the way things have always worked in God's economy, and then he's blinded on the road on his way to persecute Christians in another town, and God leads him to this devout guy named Ananias, who first objects to having anything to do with Saul because he knows it may put his life in danger, but then goes and gives the young Pharisee his sight back through the power of the Holy Spirit and is there for the moment that Saul becomes Paul - the same Paul who will go on to evangelize much of the known world at the time.
In Acts 22, Luke tells the story about the encounter, through Paul's words, and he says that Ananias told him that God chose him from a long time ago to fulfill this specific mission. God knew, when Paul was still Saul and even before Saul came to be, that He was going to transform this man from a Pharisee to an apostle and send him out into the world.
He knew this before there was a fall, before there was a flood, before there was a king, before there was a prophecy, before there was a virgin, before there was a cross, before there was a tomb, before there was a resurrection, before there was a Gospel, God knew that He would make this man and change him in this way and give him this mission and that he would fulfill it.
And He knows the same about your life and story. He knew before you were born what you were going to do in the world, how He was going to form you, how He was going to shape you, how He was going to change you, what He was going to send you into the world to do.
And everything in your life is leading toward that vision He has.
Lean into it, enjoy the ride, and think about the folks you meet along the road.
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