Bobby Bonner didn't know it yet, but that "uncatchable" ball bouncing by him towards the wall in left center field had just ended his baseball career. While thousands groaned in the Orioles' radio audience, in heaven construction started on the mansions that would house thousands of souls from Zambia, Africa: Souls reached with the Gospel because that ball was bouncing into the left center field gap.

 

     Did God make that ball skid on the Astroturf so Bobby Bonner couldn't reach it? Or did God merely let it slide by, knowing it would be used by others to question Bonner's ability? Is God's plan for your life-our lives-felled at the whim of a shift in the wind or someone else's sinfulness? 

 

     God is always involved in our daily life, always aware of the details of our lives. He didn't wind life up and set it to ticking unmanaged; He takes an intimate interest in our daily actions once we've accepted His grace. This means, for example, that Bobby Bonner could be serving and pleasing God as the Baltimore shortstop OR as a missionary to Zambia. So, if something happens to force a change of direction in what seems like the natural, God-blessed or God-directed course of our lives-including something like the wrong actions of others-God is so focused on our lives that He promises to actively bless the change in course. In other words, He blesses us when we're "on point" or redeems our actions and plans when something forces us off our charted course.

 

     Sometimes we can't see that redemption because we're stewing and chewing on the wrongs done to us. Sometimes the redemption won't be visible until we meet God face-to-face in heaven. Sometimes the redemption must take a long time to play out or make it visible. Our job is to trust in God's redemptive spirit, having witnessed it firsthand in the redemptive act of Jesus Christ, covering as it does our still stained, two-steps-forward, one-step back journey towards sanctification. We're not sinless here, but we will one day be sinless in the presence of God. Meanwhile, it is Christ's righteousness God sees as He watches us live out our lives.

 

     Bobby Bonner and his family spent three decades starting churches and training Zambians to teach and preach and care for their own congregations. Thousands of Zambians met Christ as a result of their work and the work of those they trained. 

 

     God is in control of the Bonners and those who would hurt them; just as He's in control of the givers and the takers in your life-in our lives. He is active and present and wiser than us, choosing sometimes to show us how He's redeeming our hurts and bad hops, or choosing to keep it from us because getting to that redemption means living through more bad hops and hurts before we reach it.

 

     What this means is we are never alone and we're never useless. When our path zigs left out of work, God knows our pain; when it zags right into the temptations of too much money or glory or stuff, God knows that pain, too. Our backs are covered by an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, supernatural God who knows the number of hairs on our head and the number of pebbles in the infield around us...and more to the point, all the hurts and fears that come when the hairs disappear and the pebbles throw up bad hops.

 

     Our job in those moments is to have faith that the God who loves us enough to send His son to save us, also loves us enough to have our backs in times of trial.