I hadn't even been in Salt Lake City 24 hours. Here I was going to meet with the Church I had come here to join. Right of the bat I meet a nice couple who tells me how the husband was brought from Hawaii, meets his wife from Indiana, and the two are brought to Utah and then this community in SLC. The next gentleman I meet is a new arrival to SLC. He described how God had brought him from a place he had been and loved for 30 years. God had brought him to Salt Lake City. I met others brought from New Jersey, Minnesota, Nebraska.
But I know there are also those who God is bringing from within Salt Lake City. I can think back to that last 4 years of my life, and all the people God brought into my life. Friends with wisdom and words of encouragement and correction and the exact time I needed it. Sermons from pastors when my doubt and frustration was reaching a high.
God is a sending God. God sends forth his voice, his son, and his people into broken places to carry out his will. His kingdom is breaking in around us, and we get to be sent into the places where this is happening and he is on the move.
Being versed in the language of statistics, the tendency is to describe this as random. A system to complex to describe with formulae or even a sophisticated model. There are too many relationships, there is much internal and external brokenness, and then there is God's grace. God's grace which covers us. His spirit transforms us and sends us. He sends to the hurting near and far. He sends us to those hopeless in ghettos of poverty and isolated in ghettos of wealth. He sends us to each other to remind one another how are lives are marked by grace. You carry the message of God's grace as he sends you out into the ordinary today.
