Surprised on the Island

             When you decide to do things God’s way, life can take interesting and expected pathways, even on vacations.

 I have a confession to make about vacations and church: I’ve never liked to attend Sunday services while away. It’s just not the same as my home church. My church family is family, and well, unknown Christians don’t seem like family to me. Not only that, but the service isn’t the same, the songs are often unfamiliar, the announcements are meaningless. You get my narrow-minded point. I’m a home-church-only snob.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, which is the case this time), I couldn’t skip out. When you commit to something, you leave yourself no options. (See this post, if you missed my name signed on the bottom line: http://faithfulthoughtsonthechristianjourney.blogspot.com/2013/01/this-is-what-i-will-do.html.) So when my husband and I planned to visit Mackinac Island last week, we looked up churches and planned to attend Mackinac Island Bible Church. It didn’t matter to me about music, announcements, the sermon, or how I felt about anything.  A promise is a promise: Worshiping God is what Sunday is about because God is worthy.  But God is a God of surprises, and he had plans for that day because you can’t out-give God. Never!

When we arrived at the church, which meets in a theater, we couldn’t have been more warmly greeted than we were by Pastor Ken Straight. We learned  a little of the background of the church, which predominantly reaches out to Island summer workers and sometimes even faces hostility by the community for the desire to share Christ. During the off-season, church attendance is around twenty, which might daunt any pastor, but we didn’t see that. Instead we sensed a pastor and church with a vision for sowing seed that will bring fruit later and likely off the Island.

The message was from II Kings 7 and focused on positioning yourself for blessing. Where you position yourself has everything to do with the choices you make, the blessing that can follow when you’ve placed yourself well for the kind of blessing God wants to offer. It’s what the church itself is doing: choosing to be where there is opportunity and the blessing of sowing.

As I rapidly took notes, I couldn’t help but think of the bookworm waiter at a local restaurant with whom we’d had an enjoyable chat. There were too many points of connection not to make another contact. How could we do that? One of the announcements of the morning was that one of the church members brought in some books for anyone who wanted to pick them up. Books? The mere word is all it takes for my husband and me to be interested.           

We scoped them out and selected The Case for the Real Jesus by Lee Strobel. That and a booklet version of Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren would be great additions to the waiter’s summer reading stack. Would he even consider the Friday night coffee house meeting? It was another completely meaningFUL announcement. (Was God chuckling? I was, at least internally.)

The lepers in II Kings positioned themselves for blessing. On a rocky island with poor soil for growing crops, Mackinac Island Bible Church is positioning itself for blessing and harvest, even though the spiritual soil is rocky as well. And, although I was attending church more out of commitment than anticipation, I was delightfully surprised to realize that that single choice positioned me for a sermon that fed me and the family of believers that unknowingly supported me in an opportunity to be part of planting seeds for the Kingdom of God.

So they [the lepers] got up and went… (II Kings 7, The Message) Sometimes that’s all it takes—getting up and going. Where are you positioning yourself?