A mother died from breast cancer because of a single key-stroke error on a computer. Two letters informing her of hospital appointments were sent to the wrong address because the number of her home was typed as ’16,’ instead of 1b.” This meant the cancer was not diagnosed until a year later by which time it had spread to her skeletal structure. How sad that is, and all because of a ‘b’ not a ‘6;’ small yet vitally important.
I once talked to a woman who said her desire had been to train as a nurse, and go to Africa as a missionary. She wrote off for an interview to a local hospital but had no reply, and assumed that was God’s will for her and therefore changed the course of her life. Several years later when moving some lounge furniture a letter was discovered which had fallen behind the dresser, addressed to her, from the hospital giving her an appointment. Looking back she realised that the time she would have been in Africa doing God’s work was also the time of the uprising and horrendous massacres – she would have been in it. This was clearly God’s will to save her life, so her disappointment was ameliorated by this latter knowledge.
Over the last few months we have called out the British Gas Board engineers to our Fisher and Paykel double dishwasher [two drawers]. We have an insurance policy with them for such appliances. They made a total of 4 trips to my home, once with two engineers. They couldn’t solve the problem because it was new to their knowledge and they didn’t have the necessary training to cure it. So, I called in the engineers working for the New Zealand manufacturer – “Kiwi Appliance Rescue.” The engineer walked in unfolded his canvas toolkit, extracted a long white pliable plastic rod, pushed it down the sump outlet, fiddled in the centre water reservoir and extracted what looked like a small piece of corncob. But it was actually a plastic cupboard doorstop, which was a small yellowish transparent buffer, normally glued to a kitchen unit door; how it got there no one knows. The job took about 3 minutes, and the cost was £87, which I claimed back from British Gas.
Life is full of small events that change our lifestyle destiny. It is not the momentous circumstance although that could happen, but that almost insignificant occurrence, like a misdirected and a lost letter, or a small cupboard stop; practical parables to illustrate truth. Moses hit the rock, and was denied access to the Promised Land. A small thing, he was told to speak to the rock, instead in his anger he hit it, thus giving the impression his force or effort did the job. God will not share His glory. Because of that he never entered the Promised Land, except with Elijah after they had died! [Matthew 17].
The disciples of Jesus were hunting for food and found five sardines a few biscuits, so little amongst so large a group. But they misunderstood God; what is freely given he will bless magnificently. A little given to God can become an instrument for miraculous provision. From a dew drop he can make an ocean and from a splinter make a forest. He said at creation “let there be” and it was. Three small words undergirded and charged by the Holy Ghost. We look for momentous events from God for confirmation of His divine will for our lives, but perhaps we look too high, for often they are confirmed in the small things of life.
My life changed completely through a small sentence in the Bible, “For the Levites left their suburbs and their possessions. And came to Judah and Jerusalem” [2 Chronicles 11:14]. Sandwiched in-between 66 books comprising of 1189 chapters and 31,103 verses were just 15 words that drew me from the Midlands to London. If you had told me that on the 23rd May 1984 my life would take on a dramatic change I would have laughed, almost in derision, for the last place one earth I ever wanted to live was London and its conurbations. My son was trained at Bart’s medical school and when I brought him down from Solihull I encountered traffic that was almost demonic; dirt, noise and hurried activity that I thought was from hell! The peaceful, refined kind of life on the borders of Birmingham was rudely shoved apart, and I was faced with upheaval that frightened me. Job said “that which I feared has come upon me.” [Job 3:25]
God did not need and earthquake or a flash of lightning to convince me, it was there, nestling in my daily reading, a small and almost insignificant statement that was like a loaded gun. I had read it many, many times as I read the Bible through yearly, but it had not registered before, but God’s Holy Spirit decided to reveal it at that specific time and with such dramatic force that I was almost breathless with conviction. From a large bungalow in a third of an acre, in the quiet, tranquil backwater of Solihull to a two-bedroomed flat in Portobello with no garden was, to say the least, disturbing to my human equilibrium, but out of that melee of apparent disorder HICC was born, and because of that, you are now reading this article.
