Elijah Moments

God is good...at deflating the air out of my spiritual balloon.

I have learned that in the last four months, these beginning moments of 2013. All the time I thought I had my plans and opinions, He was demonstrating the spread of His great intentions into the lives and environments in a nondescript region. There is no place on this earth His Kingdom cannot reach; a community that looks like it is dead to growth and faith always has a remnant of people that believe.

And I have met them...and I have met the purposes of God for the children, families, and community that appeared to have missed their moment.

St. Clair County Michigan has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the state. Statistics say that the community has high poverty rates and this may be one of the contributing factors to substance abuse, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and any number of societal ills that make it a difficult place to live and thrive.  But as I have had the privilege to learn many times in my life, that is a ripe opportunity for God to show Himself strong on behalf of those that believe in Him.

And I have met these people.  I am not the only one.  I am not the only one that believes God can heal  children, families, communities, cities, nations, this world.  And in the mindset of Elijah in 1Kings 19, I honestly thought I was all alone.

I've met these ones hidden in plain sight, infiltrating the hard places.  They live in the neighborhoods. They work and live and thrive in the places where the statisticians must have overlooked.  God has blessed them and then placed Kingdom ministry in their hearts.  These ones are opening hearts, lives, doors, homes to reach the brokenhearted, the abandoned, the abused, the neglected, the orphans, the widows.

And I have cried more than once at the awesome power of God, working right under the nose of the enemy of our souls - under the nose of the one whom has tried to bring the doomsday predictions to life in this region where I have been placed to make a difference.  I am awestruck and wonder struck. I have realized not only the error of my ways - believing that a city is not worth saving (like Jonah believed about Nineveh) - but the beautiful ways of redemption at work.

The Elijah Moments I have had in the last few months has taught me much about how the plans of God are never interrupted by circumstances.  He is not in the business of depending wholly on one person to save a city; He is the Great All in All and the Great I Am.  He works through relationship with others that take Him at His Word and dare to believe that they have purpose within that relationship.  Their purpose is fully wrapped up inside His.  So God forbid we think that we are ever the "only ones".

I stand corrected...and I stand amazed...