Dear God, since I finished Genesis a couple of days ago, I have been trying to figure out where to go next with my prayer journals. Should I break into new territory and go and do books I have done before? This morning I checked out 1 Chronicles, but the first 9 chapters were lists of names and genealogies. Now, I know that there is probably something in there for me, but not today. By the time 1 Chronicles picks up the narrative it is in chapter 10, and it starts with Saul being killed and David becoming king. It mentions that you withdrew from Saul because of his sin, but you were with David and he had success.
That made my think of Tim Tebow. You know that he has been pretty maligned as a quarterback. He has a lot of athletic talent, but very little quarterback ability. It’s weird because all of the sports announces and analyzers sit around and talk about what an awful quarterback he is, and on paper it seems that they are right. The offense looks ugly and he doesn’t seem to be able to play the position in a classic quarterback way. The other thing that every announcer will tell you is that he is a man of great Christian faith and character, and they have no qualms with him personally or off of the field.
The weird thing is that he wins. In fact, his team did something this last Sunday that no team has done in NFL history. They came back from being scoreless through the first 57 minutes of play and down by 15 to win the game by 3 in overtime. Apparently, there was a critical two-point conversion during which the defense called timeout and the players still feel like they had the wrong personnel on the field to stop the play they expected. Confusion.
As I was driving around and listening to the sports announcers talk about what an awful quarterback Tebow is and how improbable the win was, I couldn’t help but think back to some of the stories of Gideon, David, and the like. Now, I am the first to say that I don’t think you care who wins a football game. If you did, then I am convinced that Baylor would win a lot more than it does. However, I couldn’t help but think this week that if the Bible were still being written today, there might just be a chapter in a book somewhere about this faithful man of God named Tim Tebow, through whom God used his athletic abilities to draw attention to the needs for mission work in the Philippines, Africa, etc.
Father, I guess my point is that I think you might be working in the details of more situations than I would normally think. I look at the donations for our clinic in September. We had a great month because of two extraordinary donations: One for $25,000 and one for $7,000. Both were more than these people had given before. I could look at those and say, “Boy, aren’t we lucky to get those,” or I could look at them and say, “Wow, God worked supernaturally to provide for our needs. Praise be to God.” I hope that I will say the latter more and more often as I become aware of how much you are truly providing for us every step of the way.
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