Recently I attended a prayer meeting one cold winter night. It was a beautiful prayer meeting with every indication that God’s presence was there and prayers were answered by the Almighty God.
As we got back into the car to go home the car refused to start. We did all the checks we know/knew how to do but the car would not just move. By this time, around 11 pm, all the other brethren had left and the chilly wind, with the snow, started around 11.00pm. This development was unexpected and I was quiet, and puzzled initially. My wife, who was to drive, started singing but I did not join her immediately as I was still trying to figure out what to do, checking the engine out. Momentarily it started and we moved a few meters/yards from the parking lot to the main road and right there on the road it stopped again. We got out to push the car off the road in that chilly cold night but my wife and I could not, either because our hands were already numbed by the cold or the weight of the car was too heavy for both of us. God sent help; three men, including an aged man who put down his bag by the roadside, came to help us push it off including an aged man who put down his bag by the roadside. By the time we got the car off the road it was well after midnight and as I sat back in the car the song “Only You will I serve I have no other God” came to me and I realize that it is not easy initially to praise God when the unexpected happens.
That night our car could not take us home. In fact while we sat in the car we kept praising HIM and a cab pulled up which took us to another taxi park which eventually got us home by the early hours of the day. We praised HIM with expectations that the car would take us home but it did not. It only took us to the main road only to stop again. We now started praising HIM for HIS Sovereignty because we did not understand why it had to stop again.
We meet many different unexpected situations these days and I know every Christian has his /her own share. To some it might be unexpected job loss .You go to work without anticipating any problem but you are called and given the termination just like that! What do you do? To some you might receive some news that are not within your frame of thoughts like one of my friends will say,” things that did not even show up on your radar screen” that it was coming in. Life has it shares of the unexpected and whenever you are privileged to have that test of life you have to learn how to respond by praising God. You and I do not get to choose the type of test our faith need to go through before we move on to the next level .God who created us and knows our destination allows it to come to us so that we can graduate to the next level of fulfillment. When we take it badly and keep asking God questions like John the Baptist did when Herod put him into prison, we lose focus of God.
Today, I want to encourage you to keep PRAISING God when things are going on well and when the Unexpected happens also Praise HIM. That night in the car my wife started praising HIM immediately the car did not start, it took me a while before I could engage in Praise and I realize that the more addicted we are to praising HIM at all times the better we are at handling the unexpected .As HE that allowed that test will show us a way of escape and we would have moved one more level up in fulfilling our destiny. Weeks later, we now realized for some reasons that the engine oil in the car that night was so low that if we had driven it home the engine would have knocked.