This Invisible Path – Finding, or maybe just stumbling into, God’s plan for your life

“I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them. I will turn darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them. (Isa. 42:16).

How did I get here? This question is often asked when someone has gotten sidetracked, lost their way, or finds themselves in a situation they never imagined – or wanted – to be in. As for me, I’m well into my 65th year, I recently received my Medicare card, I’m still happily working in a ministry-oriented job that I love but never anticipated, and life is good. As a new believer (I came to Jesus in February, 1975) I often listened to a program on Christian radio, The King’s Hour, hosted by Dr. Robert Cook. He would open his broadcast with, “Hello my friend! How in the world are you?” And he would end each devotional talk with this phrase, a phrase that has stuck with me all these years:

“Walk with the King today, and be a blessing.”

That’s how I got here. It’s the best advice I could give to anyone interested in doing God’s will. Considering that I never expected to make it past the age of 55 due to an incurable blood cancer, I feel incredibly blessed – surprised even – by the sheer kindness of God that has brought me this far. I also need to say that I haven’t really gotten anywhere in life by careful planning and judicious goal-setting. In my younger years, I sometimes felt mildly guilty or irresponsible for not having that 5 or 10-year plan sketched out, with some clear vision for how I wanted my life to look down the road. The idea is, you craft this vision of your future, and then that vision guides your decisions and actions as you move forward so that you don’t live a careless, haphazard kind of life and end up nowhere in particular.

I’m not criticizing that approach – it’s just that I’ve found life to be way too unpredictable. And not just life; I’ve found my own heart to be way too unpredictable. How do I even know that I will still want the thing I planned for myself ten years into the future when I finally get there? The one constant in this earthly life is change. Change touches everything – physical circumstances, economies, societies, bodies, minds, families and relationships. All are subject to forces outside of our control. But does that mean we should all give up aiming for anything and just be a leaf in the wind? All of us have been designed by God with purpose in mind, with gifts and abilities, personalities, intellects and tendencies that are not only useful, but delightful and even powerful elements for good in this world. For me, the big question is not necessarily what do I want my life to look like in the next 5, 10 or 20 years, but how can I serve God’s purpose? Not, ‘What is God’s will for my life?” But ‘what is God’s will for the world how can I participate in it?’

Does God have a specific, unique plan for your life? I believe He does, but it probably will not look anything like your 5-year plan, your vision statement, or anything else you carefully craft on paper. Most likely, you will not know any of the future details of that plan. I can almost guarantee that the only way you’ll discover it is by taking one step at a time, navigating the sharp, unexpected curves in the road (hopefully without a major crash) as you come upon them, and that it will only be in retrospect that you see things clearly.

As a new believer in my latter years of high school, I knew I wanted to serve God in some kind of Christian ministry, but beyond that, I had no details. As time went on, I realized I had a gift for teaching (confirmed to me by fellow believers and church leaders). It wasn’t until Bible college a few years later that my wife and I heard God’s very clear call to serve in Africa, specifically in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). That call came through the invitation of a missionary. It was not something we sought out – it found us! That was the only time in my life I had a clear (more or less) plan for the future: to serve as a missionary-teacher in Congo. All the necessary preparation and support-raising took up the next five years. And then finally one day, we were there! It was wonderful, hard, life-changing, risky, and rewarding. I could never have guessed how life was going to unfold after that. Nothing else from that point on has gone the way I would have planned – including a year spent in a bush village planting a church. I didn’t see myself as a church planter/evangelist, or living in a bush village. I was a teacher. But every next step since those days has been nothing I would have expected or planned – it’s been so much better!

During our first years in Congo, my 5, 10, 20, even forty year plan was to go on doing what I was doing, what I loved – and nothing else. I’d found my place in the world. The only problem was, the world changed. At the five-year mark, bullets were bouncing off our house, military were on a rampage, our neighborhood was trashed, and we found ourselves on an emergency evacuation flight back to the USA. For the next two years I tried desperately to pick up the wreckage and resume our life in Congo – because I had no other plan and couldn’t envisage one – but the pieces refused to fit and life had irrevocably changed.

Eventually I had to surrender and just say, “Lord, you’re in control, please lead us.” He has, step by step. That was over 30 years ago. Since then, I’ve never made another long range plan. With each transition, the ‘next thing’ presented itself, or I was already doing it without realizing it was the next thing. After Congo, and fumbling around for a while, I became involved by degrees serving, teaching, leading worship and preaching for the congregation that had become our church family. I had always sworn I would never be a pastor, but by the time I was formerly asked to serve in this role and it became official, I was already neck deep in the job. What a learning curve, what a privilege, and what a mercy to me and my family to share life with those people!

During those years, I began making visits to Mali, West Africa, to teach a few weeks each year at a YWAM base, at the invitation of a friend who worked there. Relationships developed, weeks sometimes turned into months, and after 16 years of pastoral ministry, YWAM leaders asked me to consider coming to Mali to spearhead a church-planting project in an unreached area that was open to the Gospel. I had a wonderful associate pastor to whom I could entrust the church, and I didn’t see any good reason to refuse an opportunity to reach the unreached in yet another part of Africa I had grown to love, and to do it with people I had grown to love. I’m not saying that the doing of it was easy – there were lots of challenges, setbacks and hardships along the way (like almost dying of cancer) – but the direction and plan were never in question.

Fast-forward 9 years. I was praying about transitioning out of the work in MalI and turning things over to our capable team there, with a desire to maybe have a larger reach in Africa. I had no idea what that would look like or how it could happen. I couldn’t see any specific thing to do about it. Then one day while in the village in Mali, I received a message (via Facebook), from a family friend. Would I be interested in training church leaders across Central Africa to reach their communities with the Gospel? Yes, as a matter of fact, I would! The details took several months to work out, but in September 2019 I started a full-time job with Operation Christmas Child – something I would never have imagined myself doing! In a round-about way, this brought me full-circle, traveling frequently back to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I’d started in ministry all those years ago.

I share all this personal history to make a simple point: most of my life – especially the big steps and major changes – has been unplanned, unlooked-for, and not what I would have imagined myself doing. I didn’t know enough about the future (and who among us really does?) to plan these things for myself. At the same time, each of these big transitions has felt natural, precisely because I wasn’t trying to orchestrate the next step. God did the orchestrating, all I did was step through – or sometimes stumble into – the next open door in front of me.

It’s not that I have moved through life aimlessly, with no plan or sense of purpose, or easily, without significant hardships. It’s just that the plan has been exceedingly simple: walk with God.

That has been my only real plan, to follow Jesus in this world and to be useful. I can assure you that I’ve done this very imperfectly, with my share of missteps, mess-ups, and detours. But through all the twists and turns and ups and downs, He has been faithful. And this is my encouragement to you: if your desire is to follow Jesus and stay close to Him, if you set your heart to serve and be a blessing wherever you find yourself, the Good Shepherd will lead you and position you exactly where He wants you to be, one step at a time. He knows better than anyone where you will thrive, where you will be most useful, and what circumstances will best shape your life to His design in any particular season. You can trust Him. So… Walk with the King today, and be a blessing!