PERFECT TIMING

You know what?  God really does have his perfect timing.  Yesterday was a pretty emotional rollercoaster day even by my standards, and by the end of it I was completely drained.  First of all, I haven't really been sleeping well for the past week so I was extremely tired.  And then I went from feeling stressed and nervous about leading worship for the first time to church, to fun and awe when I went on a 'picnic' with church to Namsan Tower, to bittersweetness during dinner and coffee with friends to absolute seething anger by the end of the day because of something personal.  But it feels like God set up the day to happen just like that in order for me to learn about who I am and how I work.  

Yesterday's sermon was about salvation, and the pastor painted this image in my mind:

Imagine the whole world is on a hill. At the top is Heaven and at the bottom is Hell.  Everyone you know is running down the hill because it's fun and it's natural.  They're also carrying heavy bags (of sin) which keep getting bigger and bigger which makes it harder to stop going down due to the force of acceleration (he said gravity, but being the physics nerd that I am *cough*, I remembered that gravity doesn't change).  And then you see one or two people trying to go up the hill.  Why? Why would anyone want to go UP the hill? It's so difficult, it's so tiresome and it goes against the grain of the world's mindset.  

That's a short extraction from his sermon, but later he went on to ask where we, as Christians, were on that hill?  When he asked that question in the morning, I answered that I was between crawling and walking up the hill.  But last night, after all the crazy mixture of emotions and things going on, I was this close to running straight down the hill.  If it wasn't for one of my best friends helping me through the situation and advising me, I probably would have done something which I'd regret because I wanted to take things into my own hands and do what I felt right.  If it wasn't for Pastor Luke's sermon sticking with me and reminding me that I was going down the hill, it wouldn't have occurred to me that I needed to step back and re-evaluate my actions.  If it wasn't for two people telling me that I needed to go back to the Bible (on different situations), then I wouldn't have looked up verses on anger and saw God's message to me.  And at the end of the day, I remembered a line which came up during our Bible study: "GOD GIVE ME STRENGTH!"  At that time it was more of a joke, but last night it was perfect.