[Darris McNeely] Have you ever been through something in your life when you’ve wondered, why is this happening? What exactly is happening, and why is it going on? About thirty-five years ago, I was asked to move by my employer, from one state to the other. It was in the dead of winter, we’d just bought a brand new home, my oldest son was just starting at a very nice little grade school. Life was perfect. But I had to move. We took the move willingly, we trudged to the north, unpacked, and settled in, and I still wondered why. It took me a long time to figure out why – frankly, it was about three to four years later that I really began to understand why that move took place.

Sometimes God acts in our lives in ways that we do not understand, nor do we see in the moment, at that particular time. When things are taking place in our lives, as we have yielded ourselves to God, and He’s working in our lives – we’ve asked Him to guide us, and then things happen, and we don’t always know why, and may not for a number of years to come. I call that connecting the dots. Life can sometimes be a series of events that you look back on and then only in retrospect are you able to fully understand, and as we say, you connect the dots. That’s where I was with that move of mine a few years ago. There’s an example from the Bible that talks about this – it’s in the life of the apostle Paul. He’s on what is called the second evangelizing or missionary tour that he is making through the area of Asia Minor. And he seeks to go from one spot to the other, and on two occasions, it says that the Holy Spirit forbade him to go. They’d gone through some of the regions and they wanted to go into a certain area, to a town. And it says the Holy Spirit forbid them to preach the word in that area in Asia. So they decided, Well, we’ll go someplace else. But it says in the next verse here – and we’re reading from Acts 16:5-10 – they tried to go to a second place and it says the Spirit did not permit them. And so they must have been bewildered, Paul and his companions, and wondered what was going on. One night, in a dream, the apostle Paul saw a vision. A man was standing in what is now Europe, modern Greece. And that man said in the dream to Paul, “Come over to Macedonia, and help us”. And now, it goes on after he had seen the vision, “immediately, we sought to go to Macedonia, concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the gospel to them”. And so he did. And you read the account here in these verses in Acts 16, and Paul and his companions went across the water into northern Greece, Macedonia. And there they had great success.

What’s interesting to note – Luke, the writer of the book of Acts, actually is writing about this event several years later. And I have to imagine that they pondered this and they thought about it and talked about it many times into the late hours of the night, and after a while they finally realized God didn’t want them to go to those other two towns or locations. He wanted them to go to a different place, and He worked out circumstances to where they couldn’t go and finally they were directed where to go. And they looked backwards, and as I say, they connected the dots.

The lesson here for us is to certainly be obedient, put our lives in God’s hands, to live by faith, and to live righteously. But also to trust, which is another way of saying have faith that God is guiding our lives, and that sometimes when there seems to be a setback, sometimes when it doesn’t go the way we planned or the way we choose, it just might be that it is God who is guiding our steps. Learn to connect the dots. Learn to live by faith. And let God guide your life.

That’s BT Daily. Join us next time.