Photography by Rick Mortimer
I was just lazing about here on this hot afternoon thinking about my grandson Glen who came to stay and be with me at my Father’s Celebration for Life. How nice that was of him to come down and spend that time with me, and for me to be able to introduce him to a lot of my relatives – many of whom I myself had not seen since back in the early 1970’s when I left the coast to go live up north in the Yukon.
Unfortunately, when it came time for Glen to fly back home to Whitehorse, we found that had missed his flight. When you buy your tickets online you get an email with flight times on it and these are in military time. Glen, being a young fellow and unfamiliar with military clock workings, got the hours mixed up and as a result we showed up two hours late at the airport on the night of his returning home. At least we had lots of seats there at the check-in booth!
This is quite an expensive mistake and I do highly recommend to anyone flying anywhere to check your times! In Glen’s case he ended up purchasing another full fledged ticket since the airline would not give him any kind of a break on his no-show. Not necessarily unfairly on the airline’s part either, but still… a downer for Glen.
On the way back home I was telling him that one of the things I’ve learned in my life is that not everything we see as ‘bad,’ is in fact, bad. Since I am firmly convinced –unshakably so- that as a reborn Christian, I can claim protection and power and Grace, in the name of Jesus Christ, that is not available to people who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their saviour. I have seen many examples while living in the northern bush, of this protection in situations where something I at first perceived as ‘bad’ turned out to have saved my life. Some of those happenings involved grizzly bears, and many involved bad ice on the rivers and lakes. Some involved trees being blown over where I would have camped if the timing had been different, or if the horses had not run off. In other words, what was ‘bad’ at first glance, turned out to be even life-saving in hind-sight.
God uses all things for good to those who believe, and a lot of the doing of this turning what we first think is bad to good we are not aware of in the physical realm. A good scriptural example is Elijah (Elisha) asking God to open the eyes of his servant, when they were surrounded by the army of Syria. In looking at things through the physical senses, they were in deep trouble with no hope of a way out. God saw it otherwise and in the spiritual realm, the servant’s eyes were opened and he saw around Elijah and himself, a whole army of horses and chariots of fire ready to fight for them and to protect them from the Syrian Kings wrath. (2Kings 6:17,18).
I was telling Glen of this and of the stories behind the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11 where thousands of lives where lost. What we did not hear of on the nightly news (tip there!), was that hundreds of lives where also saved. I believe the number was around 300 if memory serves, who –for various reasons- had not shown up for work that day in the towers, and so lived to talk of it.
One such person I remember quite clearly; his dog had eaten his shoe-laces during the night and he had stopped on his way to work to buy new ones. He had some difficulty finding appropriate ones to go with his shoes, and the delay saved his life. He was still in the store, many miles from the Twin Towers when the airplanes where flown into the buildings.
Another was of a lady who, during the previous night had come down with a case of food poisoning and so she too was spared of being caught in the holocaust of the collapsing towers.
These are only two examples and again, if memory serves me right – there where over three-hundred people who did not show up for work on that day, resulting in their lives being spared.
Now, when you stop and think about it, did the lady with food poisoning during the night think about how lucky she was to be so sick? Did the guy needing shoe laces get excited about his time lost from work? (I can’t imagine it would be too exciting to have to phone your boss and explain that the dog ate your shoelaces!). Truth is that I doubt if very many of those three-hundred people where thinking in terms of how ‘lucky’ they were that morning – while the towers stood as they had for many mornings before.
But they were lucky; if you use the word ‘luck’ as the world uses it. I no longer believe in luck myself. The word ‘luck’ is like the term ‘coincidence’ or the word ‘try’… it does not exist in reality.
So I was able to help my young grandson see that there is more than one way to look at things. What you see as ‘bad’ may in fact be ‘good’. How do we know that if he’d caught that flight, he might have ended sitting next to someone with an infectious disease? Or that perhaps we where spared the timing of being involved in a horrible car accident if we’d left for the airport earlier? So in fact, his bad fortune was actually, his good fortune!
How do we know? Put pure and truthfully…we don’t – in the sense realm. But 2 Corinthians 5:7 tells me that as a Christian I am to walk by Faith and not by sight (sight meaning ‘of the senses’ or with my ‘earthly’ mind) . In Faith I know that as a Child of God that I am protected and loved, and that God has promised in His Word that I have the power to ‘tread upon serpents’ and be protected in the name of Jesus. (Mark 16; 15-18)
What a blessing it is to have learned these things in my lifetime and to be able to teach it to the next generation! By the time we got home from the airport that evening, Glen was smiling again (albeit a lot poorer financially), and I had strengthened my own Faith in the teaching of it.
God is awesome! And so:
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord!
