More from Lisa Stackpole

My devotional “The Unexpected,” which appeared on January 6^th, focused on the fact that we often expect God to work in certain ways. In it, I mentioned that our church was experiencing that phenomenon. As we were in the process of looking for a senior pastor, a man the elders had lined up to be interim pastor for a year while our church did a thorough search changed his mind about taking the position—just two weeks prior to his expected arrival!

When I wrote the piece we were still looking for a pastor, and God’s orchestration of that search was certainly not what we expected. The church continued to fill in with guest speakers while we earnestly sought the Lord’s will and exercised our “trust muscles,” taking this as an opportunity to lean on God. I want to share with you what Paul Harvey used to call “the rest of the story.”

The son of one of our elders was attending a major university in another part of the state at that time that had a thriving campus ministry. During a meeting, the son shared with a group what the church was going through, mentioning the name and location of the church. A ministry staff leader who was part of the group said that he had been a candidate for the position of senior pastor at the church several years before, but the church had selected a man with more experience, so he entered campus ministry instead. The young man, who had been unaware of this, shared this with his father. One thing led to another, and the man agreed to act as interim at the church, to give us the opportunity to locate a permanent senior pastor! After about nine months, that new pastor was found and hired. In the meantime, we had an excellent preacher, and the church gained valuable experience in trusting the Lord.

No, things don’t always turn out as we expect, but God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s ways are always best. Hallelujah!