God Designed Detours

I have spent the past couple of hours looking around on other blogs in this new infertility blogging world that I find myself in. It is an amazing community with so much support and encouragement from others who are going through the same experiences. It is a blessing that these women who do not know each other and probably never will can come together and encourage each other. The Lord has designed us for fellowship and this is a great example of how the Lord can use technology to bring about this fellowship! :) "But encourage one another daily" Hebrews 3:13



The sermon in church today was titled "Why the Detour?" (I think you will be able to find the whole sermon here eventually....it will be titled "Are you Ready for This? Part 10) Immediately when I opened my bulletin and saw the title of the sermon I started to tear up. I tried biting my lip, closing my eyes and blinking to keep the tears back, so that I wouldn't make a scene, but that sermon spoke directly to my heart. I knew it would be hard to hear but I knew it was just for me. One of my friends has questioned me several times about how God can actually speak to you, and before we started going down this inferitlty journey I don't honestly think that I had ever slowed down enough to really hear Him speak. But now I constantly feel like the sermons, daily Bible verses and devotionals are written just for me. And that is God speaking to me! So amidst tears here is what the Lord was speaking to me today...



With God there are no detours. To us they might seem like detours, but everything that we experience has been filtered through our Father. Nothing takes Him by surprise, our detours can be God designed. This is a little hard for me to stomach because I would rather think of our inferitility as being an attack from Satan or something that just happens because we live in a fallen world. It is hard for me to think of it as a God designed detour. Why would God design infertility when it is causing so much heart ache for so many of us!?!



In Acts 28:1-10, Paul faced some pretty big detours. There were storms and ship wrecks and yet Paul faced the detours with peace and purpose. The Lord promised to bring Paul safely through to the other side (Acts 27:24), yet He promised that there would be detours on the way. When the Isrealites were escaping Egypt, the Red Sea was a pretty big detour and the Lord saw them through. He parted the Red Sea! Their faith didn't take them around it, it took them straight through it (Hebrews 11:29)! Our perceptions of the detours in life are often self-centered, we see them as interfering with our lives, as obstacles, when we need to see them as opportunities.



Paul's detour was an opportunity for missions, to promote God's message, to witness miracles and to provide for his needs. When he was shipwrecked on Malta, the Lord used him to witness and to display God's miracles to those on the island. Our detours should cause us to look to God, listen to God and live for God. Don't sail past Malta by trying to chase our own agenda! Look at the detour as a place of ministry. Stop looking beyond the detour and instead look AT the detour. This is difficult because I want to just sail on past...I want to be finished with infertility and move on in life with a baby in my hands. But if i try to sail on past Malta I am missing out on God's reasons for allowing me to be on this detour in the first place.



Another point that pastor Ray brought up was that sometimes the detour in my life has nothing to do with me, it has to do with somebody else. Sometimes He's trying to get His message out of me and into someone else.



Maybe the detour is for many reasons. I have really grown in my faith, in my walk with the Lord since we have begun walking this path. I pray that the conversations I have with my friends and family and now this blog will change someone else's life too. I pray that I can be an encouragement to others and show them the love and comfort that I have received from the Lord. Who knows what else the Lord has in store through this detour in my life. But in a weird way I am excited to find out. Because He's got big plans for each and every one of us!!