The Lord's plans

I don’t normally watch movies or TV programs. For the most part I have less than no interest in them and find that 99.9% of them wind up being a disappointment at best. Even among ‘Christian’ movies I am often left wondering how they can label it ‘Christian’. I recently came across a movie advertisement that caught my attention, so much so that I watched the trailer for it.  It was labeled as a ‘Christian’ movie and just the name of the movie and the pictures on the case drew me in. The movie was titled Loving the bad man and showed a young couple on either side of a prison visiting window.

After watching the trailer I found myself with mixed feelings about what I had seen and about the movie itself. It had a lot of evil in it. The very basis of the movie was an evil act. But it was supposedly about forgiveness…Christian forgiveness…and redemption.

For the next 24 hours I found my thoughts turning to that movie. Time and time again I thought of that movie. Finally I went looking for a way to watch it and discovered that one of the online movie places had it for free. With mixed feelings and more than a little reluctance, I sat down to watch it.

In the movie a young woman is raped and becomes pregnant as a result. The man that raped her was intoxicated at the time and barely remembers anything of what he did. He wound up in prison as a result and the woman he raped wound up becoming the mother of his child.

The young woman is a ‘Christian’ and winds up showing the man that raped her forgiveness and love. She takes their son to the prison so this man can know and meet his son. She goes to visit him time and time again. They form something of a friendship and at times it almost seems as if they are forming some kind of relationship.

In a strange sort of way I found myself rooting for them…both of them…together.

Even as I found myself wondering just how much the theme of forgiveness would be taken…I began to wonder just how far our earthly hearts could take it.

In the movie, the young man…the bad guy…is shown as having a difficult life, with no family, no friends. It shows the circumstances that led up to him being intoxicated the night he raped the woman.

It also showed the circumstances in the life of the woman that led up to her being where she was when she and the man ‘met’. And when a horrible event changed both their lives.

There is no excuse for what the man did and the movie doesn’t make one. In fact it goes so far as to have someone tell the young man that there is no excuse for what he did. But even as it shows that…it shows that there were circumstances that led up to what happened.

It showed the ‘bad guy’ as a real person that had a life that led him to that particular place in time. In this particular situation this man hadn’t preplanned anything. He had never done anything like that before. It was something that happened that he was barely aware of after the fact.

But it had long lasting…life changing…eternal consequences.

Through a horrible act…a child was created.

People’s lives were changed.

This movie was a work of fiction but it is a very good example of real life situations that often change our lives in ways we never expect.

In that movie, a dad failed to check his daughter’s car tires, a daughter rushed off without waiting for her dad to check her car, she had a blow out, failed to wait for roadside assistance, sought help from a stranger. Life happened. Decisions made in the moments of life that led her directly into a place where disaster happened.

And a miracle was created.

A young man had trouble at work, sought solace in a bar, agreed to help the stranded woman, and harmed her.

And a miracle was created.

In that fictional movie…I saw so much of how life truly is orchestrated by our Lord. He works out our moments so that we are in the exact place we need to be in order for His plan to come about.

Just like all the moments, all the details, that had to come together in the lives of those two people so that they could create a child together.

Even the girls dad and the bartender at the bar had a role in what happened in the creation of that child.

There is no doubt that what that man did to that woman was evil. But…if it had been real life, and it does happen in real life, if it had happened just as that movie portrayed…the Lord would have used it to bring about His plan. And He does just that in the lives of all people every day.

I think of how my husband and I met. I was somewhere I did not want to be and had no intention of being on the day he and I met. My husband had decided not to visit that place again. And then…there we both were. We met and six weeks later we were married. I have been told I was crazy to marry my husband that quickly. And I can kind of understand, especially when I remember that I only spent 8 days with my husband before marrying him. The rest of those 6 weeks we spent in separate states conversing long distance.

But when I think of what brought my husband and I together…it’s nothing short of a miracle.

There was a long line of things that made me be where I was the day my husband and I met. If things had worked out the way I intended them to I wouldn’t have been there that day or ever again.

There was a long line of things that made my husband be where he was when we met. If things had worked out by his plan he would not have been there.

We both had plans…but the Lord directed our steps. And He directed them in such a way that we went from strangers to husband and wife in six weeks.

Oh, the things that happen in our lives that get us into things we would never get ourselves into. If someone would have told me I would marry a man I had only known six weeks and had only spent eight days with…I would never have believed them. But I wound up doing just that.

So many things work ‘behind the scenes’ in our lives to make us be where we need to be when we need to be there. We very often never see those things that happen to get us where we need to be.

As I write this my body is fighting off an illness. My head hurts and my throat is scratchy. I can think of only one encounter that may have passed this virus to me…a woman that stood in line behind me at the store a few days ago.

I can’t say for sure that she is the one that passed this virus on to me. I could well have picked it up off a shopping cart, a door handle, even through the air in an area where no one was. How I picked it up doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I did pick it up and in order for me to do that there had to be someone, somewhere that spread the virus to the place that I would be. I may have never seen that person but they shared their germs with me all the same.

It is a behind the scenes thing that took place for me to get this virus.

Just as there are often behind the scenes circumstances that take place in our lives, sometimes with complete strangers, to put us in the situations we find ourselves in.

The woman in the movie was raped because the man made a bad, evil decision. But he made it after having a very difficult day… and there were many things that contributed to his bad day. The man wouldn’t have been able to rape that woman if circumstances in her life hadn’t put her directly in his path that night. Circumstances that involved people he had never met.

There was a plan at work, a hand behind the entire thing. In this case it was the plan of the people that made the movie but real life works in much the same way that movie did. So many things play a part in our lives, in the things that happen in our lives, that put us here or there. There is a plan behind what happens and our Lord’s hand is the hand that controls it all.

We may make plans…just as the young woman in that movie had…but the Lord directs our steps. In that movie a child was created because of an evil act that brought two people together that would never have been together on their own.

There was a reason for the evilness. Even as that evil act caused the young woman unspeakable pain and anguish…it created a life that would not have been.

That movie…that work of fiction…is a very good example of the work of the Lord in the lives of those on earth. There is even a place in the movie where the young man says that the worst thing in his life was turning out to be the best thing.

How many times do the bad things in our lives seem like the worst thing ever at the time but then wind up giving us something good?

The example in this movie was a worst case kind of example but the working out of a plan that had to happen can be seen within the movie if one looks at it with the understanding that the Lord controls all.

Yes, you could just as easily see the single act of evilness on the part of the young man. And you could see the devastation brought to the young woman and her family. And it could be left as that. A bad man doing a bad thing that deserved all that he got because of what he did. Or you could look beyond that and see that there was a carefully orchestrated chain of events that took place to put those two people in the same place at the same time.

Seeing that Lord controls all, that He allows even the evil in our lives for a purpose, in no way diminishes the evil, it just shows us that there is a reason for it. There is a method to the madness.

Out of the horror of a single event the Lord brought something precious into the life of the young woman and He gave life to a soul that He obviously very much wanted to be born. There was some very big plan for either that baby or it’s parents. Possibly both.

You might say that there was a very big plan for all of them. The very plan itself shows that there was a purpose to it. In the movie…the plan was to make the movie…to share forgiveness and redemption with the viewers.

In real life the plan is something we often cannot see but it is of eternal proportions.

The Lord guides our steps, placing us where He wants us, when He wants us to be there, so that He can work out His eternal plan for us and for all of those around us…for all of mankind. What our part in that plan is we may never know, we don’t actually need to know, although it would be nice if we did…I think…but we can know that we have a part in that eternal plan. And that the Lord takes everything in our lives and works each experience out so that we play our part in that plan.