A Holy Encounter

While standing in line the other day at a local eatery, I struck up a conversation with a young guy who was waiting alongside of me.  As it turned out, he is from Nigeria and has been in the country for eleven years now.  He is working on his degree at the local university.  When he found out what I did before retirement, he told me a bit about his religious beliefs as one whose mother was Pentecostal and whose father was Catholic.  It was good conversation and as we were at the end of our moment together he said, "What advice would you as an older man give to a young man?"    

It made me think about an old movie favorite called, "Secondhand Lions" in which the main character, an older man, gave a speech to young me that was known as "What every young man needs to know about being a man."  I am not sure my response to his question will ever be the subject of a movie and I am sure it was not nearly as profound as I would have liked for it to be, but it was what it was in the moment that God provided the two of us there as we shared a moment of waiting.  Still, I am not one to regard such times as coincidence.  Life is not about chance, or coincidence as every moment and every person God brings into our life speaks about His purpose and plan.  

While I am not sure the young Nigerian student will remember what I said to him, I do believe that God gave us a moment of being together for some particular reason.  As we stop and reflect on our life, we begin to see all sorts of such moments in the ordinary times of our living and it is never a part of the plan of God for anyone of us to waste a moment that God gives.  The word we might speak today might be totally different tomorrow simply because such is the nature of the plan of God for us.