God's Purpose

My daily life is filled with confusion on what’s God purpose for me. Maybe, you’ve been there, where you’re asking God to show you a sign or lead you somewhere so that you can know what you’re doing is right in His eyes. Then sometimes out of the blue, when you least expect it, it hits you, something happens and you know God’s will was for you to be exactly where you were, at a particular moment. "It was meant to be," you say to yourself.

Well that's what I encountered today. I've been taking BART for a handful of days now. Sitting in the seats drinking my OJ in the morning, all the while thinking how often they clean the upholstery that my back is rubbing up against. In the afternoons I walk from school along desolate railroad tracks to the BART station. Any time I have waiting to the next BART to Dublin/Pleasanton, I spend reflecting, sitting in the open air and then finally opening up the bible and going to the place where I have left off. Yes, Leviticus. A little dry.

Today, I walked back from a teacher union rally with another teacher to a BART station. As we arrived inside the BART station, I was unfamiliar with this station so I wasn’t sure where I was to go, so stood there on the ground floor chatting for a while, not noticing the BART train for me was already waiting on the underground level below. When the other teacher told me that it was my train, I scurried down the escalator only to find as my feet touched the bottom steps, the BART doors were closed and the train was beginning to move. Yes, I would have to wait another 15 minutes. I had missed the train that I was supposed to get on.

After 14 minutes of waiting in the chillness of being underground, my BART train approached and I stepped on sitting in seat close to the door. A few funny middle aged men dressed in plaited shirts and Dockers and the entire business casual look stood there chatting back and forth about their trip to San Francisco and their thoughts on the redwoods. When one man sat down in a seat close to me, while the other stayed standing, the conversation became interesting.

"Carbon dating uses assumptions. It uses the assumption of how much carbon was present thousands of years ago..."

The conversation was heading straight toward God.
As they chatted back and forth, I kept listening, not sure if or how I was to enter the conversation. I waited for several minutes, hoping the two men would see me tuning in, or seeing me smiling. But they didn’t. At last, when the man standing moved closer to me, I looked at one man and then the other and said, “You’re a believer and you’re not.”

Both men looked at me and nodded. “I’ve been working on this one for a while,” the man standing said. “I just don’t have the faith that he does,” the other responded.

I asked him if he had heard the concept of Jesus, because I told him somebody had showed me this diagram a few years ago and that I wanted to share it with him. The man said he was interested in hearing it, and so I got up at sat next to him. For about the next 15 minutes, I shared the synopsis of the bible and the purpose of Jesus. His humble heart agreed with the state of humans falling short of the glory of God. He agreed that he had tried different means in his life to reach God. When I told him about opening his heart to God, I became tearful and shaken in my speech. He began to tear up, too.

As we walked off BART, he could not stop thanking me. “This was meant to happen,” he kept saying.

I pointed to the sky and told him to praise God and have faith. I’ve just a mere person falling short of the glory of God with all of my troubles. That’s why I’m a believer.

I walked out of the BART with the group of men, there were a couple of others in their party, and they gave me their business cards. I walked to my car, rejoicing in the love God has for us. I felt real joy and I knew that it was my purpose to share the good news of Jesus to him. I praised God for allowing me to have a purpose for Him that day.

When I got to my care, I sat in front of the steering wheel praising and praying to God.

“I wasn’t even supposed to get on that BART train.” I thought.

But, now I knew I had ended up getting on the right one. With God you are always on the right one.

For the man who heard the gospel that day, I do not know where he is, whether he has fully accepted Jesus as his savior, but God has given me peace because I know I did what I was supposed to do.