God’s Mysterious Ways:
To Catch a Thief
I
have no doubt that all of the experiences in my life were orchestrated to train
me to fully trust the Lord. During my college days, Psalm 27:13 would always
play over and over in my spirit, “I had fainted, unless I had believed to see
the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” I grew up in the Church
and in a Christian home, but everything had to be proven to me even though I
had always experienced supernatural happenings.
Even
thirty-three years ago at the age of thirty-three, when God called me and
consecrated me for a work in the Kingdom He always admonished me to trust Him.
So often He would say, “Trust Me even (and especially) when you can’t trace
Me.” Today, I would define trust as
“blind faith” because usually there appears to be no rhythm or rhyme to how God
has led my life these many years. Once
when I questioned Him about His patterns and directions in my life, He simply
said, “There’s a method to My madness.” And then He proceeded to teach me about
paradoxes.
Here
I will share two parallel experiences that were separated by the span of
fifteen years. They were certainly
mysterious! Even though we can boast that “we have the mind of Christ” I still
must agree with Romans 11:33 “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and
knowledge of God! How unsearchable are
his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”
When
my son was between two and three years old and attending a nursery school, I
was working for the IRS in my hometown.
While at work one Friday afternoon, I began to feel ill. Soon my supervisor came by my desk and
commented on my appearance. She encouraged me to go home if I didn’t feel well.
I said that I would if I didn’t feel better by lunch which was approximately an
hour away. Well, by lunchtime I could
barely sit up straight; so I checked out for the day and headed home. I decided to go on home and to pick my son up
later. When I got just a few blocks from
home I realized that I felt just fine which was really amazing to me, but I
continued on home. When I put my
key in the door to enter my apartment I
discovered that the night chain was blocking me from entering. Instinctively, I began to yell “Who’s in
there?” I was divorced, and only my
toddler son and I lived there; so I became furious, instead of afraid.
The
apartment only had a front door; so the intruder, a male, came out of the door
with his hands raised saying that he was doing nothing. Well, I was so angry that I followed him long
enough, just asking him why, that I mentally recorded everything about him
which enabled law enforcement to arrest him before the day ended. He had
gathered up all of my “valuables,” but the Holy Spirit aborted his criminal
activities at my home through me.
Fifteen
years later, after I moved back to my hometown after my first four year mission
across the country I had a very similar experience. One night after retiring for bed, the Spirit
of God reminded me that my seventeen
year old son told me that he was cold the night before; so I got up to turn the
heat up and discovered that someone had broken in. He was more shocked than I
was and jumped back out of the window through which he had entered dropping all
of his “stash.”
Why
would my good and loving Heavenly Father orchestrate these two incidents to the
extent that I was the one, a female, to
catch these culprits in the act of burglarizing my home? It is mysterious to me, but I love Him and I
know that He loves me and that He had divine reason for it all. He taught me
that I can trust Him when He said in Joshua 1:9 “Have I not commanded
thee? Be strong and be of good courage;
be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee
whithersoever thou goest.”
Marion
Clark Ingram
