The Spirit Moves in Mysterious Ways.

One thing I learned while in America this past 6 months is that many people read our blog. Most of our readers are people that we would never think of. For those of you who follow our blog or Facebook know how crazy our lives can get. Since returning to Thailand, we have had a little time to get things set up again, but things quickly got busy again. This past weekend, we had a national revival. It started Thursday night and ended Sunday afternoon. RCC's job in this revival was cooking, cleaning, and selling drinks. It was a good time but a very tiring time. The plan was for our team to get up early on Monday morning after the revival and drive 8 hours to have our annual planning retreat. We were supposed to stay at a house outside of Loei, cook our own food, and spend time planning. As we were preparing Sunday, while the revival was finishing, we were all very tired and not looking forward to the drive and extra work of the retreat. My family and I left Watcharapon and started getting things ready to go. Katryn happened to look down at one of our tires and saw a big chunk taken out of it. So, we had to go replace the tires on the car because they would not last the trip. That evening, we ate dinner at a restaurant. That night, Kathryn woak up with bad stomach pains. We were up the rest of the night dealing with the effects of food poisoning. So by Monday morning when we were supposed to leave, we had not slept and Kathryn could not leave the comfort of the bathroom for more than a few minutes. So we called our team and told them that we could not go. Through this, the rest of the team gathered and decided to postpone the trip until after the new year.

Through this strange course of events, it made me think about the way the Holy Spirit works in our lives. There are 2 ways to look at this situation. 1. There were a lot of chance happenings that come together to ruin the planned retreat. or 2. God's hand was in these events to help our team to take some time to rest before the busy next couple of weeks. We normally don't like to think of bad things like bad tires or sickness as good ways in which God works. If we take this view of the way God works, it opens the box in which we keep God's providential hand and sheads new light on all the things that happen in our lives.

God's Peace Be with You!

Andy