Daily Devotion - May 23
I will send a brief message each day (except Mondays)
while we are pausing gathering in person.
- Kara
- Kara
When a story unfolds, it’s impossible to say it could have happened any other way. Think of your own stories of childhood, or college, or career, the places you’ve lived and the friends you made and the choices that have shaped your path. Taken together, they are your story. Would you be the same person if things had happened differently?
If you had said yes to the other job offer, or come a few minutes earlier and met different people in the school registration line? If you’d gone to the camp the week before or after and missed the speaker whose words lit up your soul?
I can play this game with my life very easily. What if I hadn’t stopped spontaneously for that DQ blizzard which I ate in hours-long, standstill traffic with the rest of session, and instead had been ten miles further up the freeway where the terrible accident occurred? What if my seminary roommate hadn’t gotten sick, and the person she was proofreading for hadn’t had me pinch-hit in her place? (spoiler- I married the guy.) What if I had ended up randomly assigned to a different group at that conference in New Jersey twelve years ago, where I met someone who would become one of my closest friends and colleagues? (shout out, Jodi!).
If any one thing in any of our lives were different, the whole story would be different.
That happens to Paul in our scripture today, and to Lydia too. First of all, the story begins with a pretty bossy Holy Spirit, who keeps shutting down Paul’s plans and pointing his group in directions they hadn’t planned to go. But by this point, Paul is used to the Spirit’s wily ways, and has learned to pay attention to curious things, like dreams. And then he gamely goes wherever it seems like he’s being led. And so they end up in Philippi.
When they get there, who knows why Paul didn’t start with synagogue there like he did other places? Why were he and his companions wandering along a river outside the city on this fine Sabbath day, instead of checking in with the powers that be in their local religious gathering? What had they heard about this “place of prayer” that they set off to discover it? And when they first saw it, it was nothing to them. They had no way of knowing then that it would become a sacred place for them, a quiet and holy place they returned to often.
And surely, as they walked along that day, they had no idea their lives would be changed by a person they were about to meet “by accident.” And she didn’t know her life was about to change either. This “seller of purple cloth,” an established businesswoman who happened to be in this place of prayer that Sabbath day, was a worshiper of God- meaning, a Gentile who followed the God of Israel. She had joined with other women on this day of rest in a place they liked to go pray and talk about God together. In other words, without yet knowing what it was, they were being Church. And on that one innocuous day, God brought together these two leaders. God had plans they could not possibly have imagined.
All over this story we see the fingerprints of God, the breath of the Spirit, blowing the story along, leading and prompting people into situations they could never have imagined, and yet, looking back, could never imagine their life without.
So Paul meets Lydia. And when he tells her about Jesus Christ, God opens her heart, and she knows what Paul is telling her before she hears it. The message he shares resonates deep in her being; it is meant for her, she is meant for it.
She knows right then this is her story, and she’s ready to live it. Immediately she is baptized – her whole household is, in fact. And she urges Paul’s posse to stay with her, and then once again, their plans shift. I love this wording, “she prevailed upon us.” She prevailed and they relented. So they stay at her house and are embraced by the lavish hospitality of the first Christian convert in Europe.
This Jesus-follower’s house becomes for the road-weary little band a kind of home base, a place to eat home-cooked food and sleep in clean sheets and wash their clothes, a place they return to for comfort and care, where they go to find themselves again.
Lydia quickly becomes for them the friend you keep in touch with over years and distance, the one you can send friends to when they’re passing through town and she will throw open her door and hug a stranger over the threshold. “Any friend of Paul’s is a friend of mine!” she’ll laugh as she takes your coat and boots. That will be Lydia’s house.
And later on, when Paul and Silas are locked up and then released from prison, Lydia’s house is where they’ll go to rest up and get sent out again.
God invites Lydia into ministry, quite apart from Paul’s initial plans or intentions. Then, from different paths in different parts of the world, God weaves together these two souls, so that one day, if they were to look back they would not be able to imagine who they would have been, or where their lives would have gone, if they hadn’t met one another in a seeming coincidence on that one day back then.
And it wasn’t just the two individual lives that were changed, but the Church that was coming to life. Here and there, spreading and growing in homes and communities, in lives changed and hope shared, the Church was shaped by Pastor Lydia, Leader Lydia. Lydia’s house, Lydia’s table and her message, her influence and her energy, her hospitality shaped the Church in Europe. She embodied the gospel message that Paul wandered around telling people about.
And how did the message Paul preached get jolted and altered when, instead of the Jewish man from Macedonia he’d dreamt about, expected and intended to meet – the person God introduces him to is a Gentile woman who already knew, but was waiting for an introduction to, Jesus the Christ?
When Paul wrote to the Church in Philipi, his letters most likely got delivered right to Lydia’s house, and can you imagine our bible without the book of Philippians?
We have plans, and God overrides them. We have expectations, and God thwarts them. We have assumptions, and God rearranges them. We have our ideas of what makes a good life, and God gives us a good life, sometimes quite in spite of and apart from those ideas. This God of love and redemption is never not up to something. Even here, even now.
Here and now especially.
God is always bringing the world to wholeness, bringing people back to God and each other, and this cannot be stopped.
One of the joys of this life is that we get to look back and see how what unfolded is how we got where we are – especially those things we hadn’t planned on or prepared for. We get to notice how the things that happened along the way were part of God’s work in us. And we can see how some deeply meaningful people and impactful moments were often not things we set out pursuing or expecting, but were what ended up happening instead.
This time we are living in right now was on none of our calendars. We had other plans. We had ideas about what makes our lives good, and for most of us, it wasn’t this. But here we are. What will God do with us in this place? How will these weeks and months get woven into our stories? How will they alter the meaning or direction of our lives? And what will God do not just in us, but through us, because of this unexpected turn? Each of us, but us together as well - how will the ministry of our congregation be shaped through what unfolds in this unusual and unforeseen chapter?
The breath of the Spirit is blowing our story. All over our lives are the fingerprints of God. These days hold moments that, one day, we will never be able to picture our lives, or our church, without. God has plans we could not possibly imagine. I look forward to looking back and seeing what they were.
CONNECTING RITUAL:
Perhaps tonight before bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:
God, I had not planned for this time,
but here I am.
Thank you for the ways you've prepared me, like...
Help me through the parts that I'm finding difficult right now, like...
Thank you for the gifts I couldn't have anticipated, like...
For what you are doing that I can see, thank you.
For what you are doing that I cannot see, thank you.
For the future you have in store for me, and for all of us,
thank you.
Amen.
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