A Personal Encounter

Many of you have never heard my story of God’s tender care. Recently with all of the news about the economy, this encounter came to mind to remind me Who cares:

At the time, I was working for an oil and gas company in the downtown Denver area. I had a practice of taking my lunch hour, whenever possible, outside walking around the city streets getting away form the office and getting a little exercise.

One lovely summer day as I was heading back to my office something amazing happened. As I write this, the picture remains crystal clear.

The 16th street pedestrian mall was still rather new and a good portion of the offices emptied out onto the mall during weekday lunch hours. This made the sidewalks rather busy. In addition, a couple of banks sponsored outdoor concerts on various days which tended to draw bigger crowds.

It was on one of these days that I was lost in my own thoughts as I walked along the mall back toward my office and work responsibilities. Through the crowd I saw two individuals who clearly stood out in the crowd. These two individuals were about one half block away from me wearing jeans and no shirts. There were many, many people between us yet it seemed that we caught one another’s eyes and they walked directly toward me.

Having worked in and walked around the downtown area for several years, I had become accustomed to being asked for “spare change’, to “help” or, in general, just fork over some money to meet a perceived need. As you can probably tell, I had become a bit hardened to the process. Scammers to many to count clouded the real need that was present.

So as these tow individuals approached me form over one half block away they asked for money. My automatic reply was “no” as I walked on.

This is where things started to get interesting. As I approached my office building there was an outdoor concert in the park around the office tower. As I approached the crowd of people a bird, a sparrow I think, flew directly under my foot as I was stepping down. I jerked my foot up before crushing the bird and it flew off.

Immediately the scripture flooded my mind where Jesus told his followers that they were “ worth more than a sparrow” and “ if God so cares for the sparrow, will He not care for you”. I quickly turned around and headed back to the mall knowing that I had to find those two strangers.

I looked up and down the mall. I went into store after store looking for these two distinctive guys. After some time, I began to ask people if they had seen to shirtless guys walking around. No one had seen them. I was just beginning to think that I had misunderstood the sparrow incident when I say a young man sitting on one of the benches close to the area where I had seen the two strangers. I thought that if he had been there awhile he would have had the best chance of having seen them.

As I approached this young man, I asked if he had seen the two shirtless strangers. He said he had not so I asked how long he had been sitting there. He said that he wasn’t sure.

For several minutes this young man told me about his life and that, just that very morning, he had been kicked out of his friend’s apartment and didn’t know what he was going to do.

Is our God amazing or what? Do you realize the lengths He will go to make sure you have what you need? If it takes two shirtless angels; if it takes a wayward sparrow; if it takes a dense accountant, He will see that it is done.

Trust Him! He has proven Himself trustworthy over and over again.

Trust Him! No matter the size of you problem, big or small!

Trust Him! You only think that there is no answer!

Trust Him!