If your life were music, how well would it be played?

Jenise and Jene' have frequently commented on my pet theme of Divine Providence. Some time back Jenise was talking about how certain she is that on a couple of occasions God has spared her from major calamity or from a life changing disastrous mistake. She gave the times and illustrations. Jene' also shared about the timing of events which had seemed to have been negative but later proved to have provided a venue or timing for something really good to happen.

We talked about how sometimes God puts us in places and situations where we don't recognize the Divine Providence until years or miles down the road. We are then able to look back and see His hand distinctly.

I shared with them the life story of Marco Polo, really an incredible story of a young fellow whose uncle and father went to visit a young up and coming Uzbekistan tribal leader who was in Kaifeng (Mongolia). Polo's uncle and father were attempting to establish a trade arrangement with this young leader for his people's goods to be sold in Venice and their Venetian goods to have a market in that part of Asia just east of the Caspian Sea. One visit led to another visit, each successful business-wise. Marco began accompanying them when he was about 17 years old. Each visit required them to go to another part of Asia as the young tribal leader was expanding his base of operations. Eventually Marco Polo became a deputy to this Asian leader, assisting him and advising him and eventually even governing a significant and substantial portion of the empire. The tribal leader was Kublai Khan.

Marco Polo traveled a lot as an emissary  for Kublai Khan, seeing such places as (present day) Viet Nam and the southeast Asian countries, Tibet and India, the Persian Gulf countries and the countries which used to be part of the Soviet Union and border Iran, Iraq and China. At the age of 44 he was back in Venice and was captured by the Genoese Navy who was at war with Venice. He spent a year in a prison. While there he told a fellow prisoner about who he used to be and the places he had been. That fellow prisoner wrote it all down and after Polo was released from prison the book was published in French.

Two hundred years later, a youngster from the city-state which had once imprisoned Marco Polo, read the book and became committed to finding a sea route to these fabulous places Marco Polo had seen. That youngster was Christopher Colombus.

The ways of God in our lives are not forecastable, not predictable and certainly would not be believable if we were to have the story beforehand to tell. What are the odds? How do we identify what is disaster or misfortune? for someone who had been everywhere and been somebody and seen everything to be reduced to being an unknown prisoner by some mischance of fortune, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jailed by those who didn't know him nor care with someone who was a nobody, but a good listener. The book that prisoner penned changed the course of human history. It was the textbook on the Orient for about 500 years.

Adversity is only an opinion formed by someone who doesn't understand the Divine ordination and providence of a God who has ordained and anointed footsteps of anyone willing to confess their sins. "If we confess our sin he is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." The footsteps of the righteous are ordered by God."

Adversity doesn't come because of sin. It doesn't come because someone missed the will of God. It comes to put us in the place where God can use us.