At an age when many are preoccupied with thoughts of retirement or retirement planning (as I practice in my earthly vocation), my thoughts increasingly relate to more eternal matters.
Has the time I have spent regularly reading through the Bible and praying affected not only how I think, but also how I act out in the world each day? Have I made the right choices? Am I doing what God wants me to do?
Perhaps all these could be summed up in one two-fold question: What were or are my purposes in life, and am I achieving them? No matter one's particular faith, I suspect we all ask ourselves such questions from time to time.
The first two questions above — how I measure up in my daily encounters and how my faith has affected how I think and act — often do not come up in routine and expected interactions with others.
Last summer, for example, after making a rather large purchase, I discovered within the hour that I had been undercharged considerably. Admittedly, for a brief moment, I debated what to do. With my conscious acting as my guide, though, I quickly returned to the store and paid an additional few hundred dollars.
It was closing time, and most of the associates were standing up front when I went in and announced why I was back. It made such an impression that one of them left and returned with the owner. One would have thought I had done something much more significant that I imagined it to be, but I explained simply that because of my relationship with God, I had no choice in the matter.
More recently, I had a bad experience in a department store, which ended with my loudly and rudely firing all verbal barrels at the store manager and an associate. Not that I wasn't right to be upset, but I was not right to show my dissatisfaction as I did. For that I could only ask forgiveness later.
I believe that the reasons for those occurrences can be summed up this way: As we live out our lives through our faith — mine as a Christian by way of a born-again experience — we are participants in a rehearsal preparing us for the main performance that lies ahead.
We always need to listen to that still, small voice that prompts us, as it did me one recent Saturday. My wife, Dianne, and I had spent the day in a hospital visiting with a niece and nephew whose dad was still comatose with extensive brain damage 10 days after falling from a ladder. The two already had lost their mother (Dianne's sister) just a few years earlier.
As we all were leaving a restaurant, standing just outside were a man and two women. I noticed then — as I had in the restaurant — that the man had the kind of voice one might hear on a broadcast commercial, so I stopped to ask if he was in radio. He responded that he was a singer, and one of the ladies added that he was an evangelist. She also said they were all three believers, and after I shared the story of what had happened to Dan, they said they would pray for him.
Was it mere coincidence that they were standing just outside the door as I was leaving? Or was it what I like to call a God encounter, prompted by my responding to my inner spirit?
My foremost prayer for family, friends, our nation, or whatever, has become, Lord, I pray for your perfect will! I find it to be all-encompassing, particularly when prayed in faith and when I am unsure how to pray in specific situations. But I also follow the example of Jesus and pray specifically — as I have for Dan — petitioning God for specific outcomes in accordance with his permissive will.
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