Where God Sends Us

I've been on quite a few mission's trips, and spent time praying about every single one of them. I remember talking to multiple people on various occasions about deciphering where and when God might want me to go in my ministry. More than once the response I got was, "What are you asking for? God has already told us to go out to the nations and this is your opportunity."

It never really felt like the right response, so I prayed through it every time anyway. So, tonight when I read Luke 4:25-27, it hit me that there was a reason I felt the need to pray. God's timing is not always our timing. Jesus was wise enough as a child to start is His ministry, but God had Him wait until He was 30 years old. 

Jesus says this in Luke, "I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah's time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed - only Naaman the Syrian."

Similarly, although we are surrounded by people who need Jesus right where we're at, He may be asking us and leading us to bring Jesus to people somewhere else. 

Even the right thing, at the wrong time, is the wrong thing. The right thing, in the wrong place, is the wrong thing. The only way we can know the right time and the right place is through discerning the Lord's guidance in the situation.