God puts you where he wants you be at that moment

God puts you where he wants you, whether you realize it or not.


Have you ever started to go somewhere? You were walking out the door.....or getting ready to leave work and something changed. something pulled you back. Something detained you. Maybe it was a last minute phone call, or you forgot where you put your keys, or you saw something that suddenly you realized had to be done right then.

The decision made you late you thought. You missed something you thought, but did you really. Or did you just fail to pay attention to the moment. Was there something there that was overlooked? Something that might not have happened but for your last minute change of plans?  I call those moments serendipitous. I also recognize them as God's little conversations with me.

That moment when the power higher than us all calls upon us individually to take notice and pay attention to something. Many people go through their lives missing those moments. I must admit, I must have missed a million of them before I finally began to realize that most things don't happen by chance. Things happen for a reason. There is purpose to life and purpose to moments and more often that we stop to realize, there is an invisible hand guiding us.

Today was such a day. My wife and I were on the way home from an afternoon meeting and late lunch with a friend. We needed to stop for cat food on the way home and I reminded her that our local pet store was about 300 yards away from where we were leaving lunch. We had already decided to go there on the way home. The wife said no, let's just go by the grocery on the way home. I wanted the brand we always buy at the pet store, but the wife was persistent, she wanted to go to the grocery and didn't want to bother with the pet store today, "we can do that tomorrow.". So it was decided at the last minute, to the grocery we would go.

Once there, we were shopping the isles for a few things and the cat food, when I suddenly looked up and saw this smiling man about my age approaching. He wore a ball cap with a familiar insignia and as he approached, I stuck out my hand and said "Semper Fi Marine!" He responded in kind and asked if I had been in the Corps. I indicated most certainly that I had and we exchanged a few brief pleasantries about old times and the Corps and then he asked me: "You ever see the youtube video of the Marine that sung the National Anthem A cappella ?" I said as a matter of fact I have seen that. The video went viral didn't it? Yes it had......

This old Marine smiled and said it sure did. I'm that guy he said. He then introduced himself to me and he and my wife and I spent the next twenty minutes standing in a grocery store isle just listening as he shared his experiences with the Lord and Matthew 24 and how he came to learn the anthem by heart and the lost verse that so many had discovered when his version hit youtube.

What a wonderful man. His name is Louis Shaffer and I invited him to come join us tomorrow for a Patriot Guard mission that is for a local veteran. A mission honoring a Vietnam veteran who was killed on new years eve night when a drunk driver struck his motorcycle and killed him. Louis said that he will be there and he called me when he got home just now to confirm the directions and the specifics of the time.

I made a new friend today. A Christian man and a fellow Marine and someone of deep commitment to his faith and his country. We share a lot of similarities and tomorrow we will share a brotherhood of carrying one of our own to his final rest.

Tell me things don't happen for a reason. Tell me there is no purpose to life. Tell me that we are all here by some chance encounter and the aftermath os a universal explosion. Go ahead tell me. In the mean time I will tell you.....Semper Fidelis!