Fingerprinting God

Sunday, July 18, 2010
Fingerprinting God

An ongoing thread I try to string into everything we do on the trip is the concept of looking for God’s fingerprints. Fingerprints are unique. No one in the entire world has one identical to yours. Because of that fact, if your fingerprint is found somewhere, it must have come from you. Your fingerprint can place you at the scene, uncover your actions, and reveal your true identity.

This mission trip is a fantastic time to focus on the fingerprints of God. He is still very active in the world, and his fingerprints are everywhere. Sadly, we have trained our eyes to scan over his heavenly handiwork and credit his glory to something or someone else.

God’s glory is difficult to define—it’s kind of like trying to define love. Perhaps the best way to telling someone what it is is by pointing to it over and over again. My goal for the trip is to continually point out God’s fingerprints so that his trip may be to the praise of his glory. My hope is that would become more sensitive to how he works and spot his hand more often.

Throughout the trip, I intend to have a few youth reflect on the fingerprints they’d observed. For some of what I’m talking about, consider:

While humming along I-40 at 65mph, one trailer’s wiring harness flew off. Just before arriving at our hotel, one van’s electrical box began to blow fuses at 8:30pm. Capital One deactivated the church credit card after “suspicious gas station charges.” When I said last Sunday that a million things can go wrong, I underestimated. Without God’s sustaining hand, all things fall apart.

God has his fingerprints all over these inconveniences. Just before the harness fell off, the Crown Vic noticed something dragging and were watching as if tumbled down the road and hit there car. They pulled off, picked it up, and handed to Jarin who repaired the shredded wires and attached the harness. The fuses blew half a mile from an Advance Auto Parts store that closed at 9:00pm. Though my credit card was declined when purchasing the fuses, it wasn’t taken, and I was able to have it reactivated before paying for hotel charges.

What was God doing in these inconveniences? I image a billion things we’ll never know. Maybe he wanted us to be able to talk to the salesman at AAP or Sebastian, the Capital One rep about why we’re traveling to NOLA. Maybe he wanted us to slow down to miss an accident ahead of us. Maybe he wanted me to humble me and increase my reliance on other leaders by exposing my total ignorance of wire harnesses and fuses. We can speculate, but what I know is that God is not absent in our trials; nor has he abandoned us in our time of need. He is sustaining us moment by moment to draw us up into his love for us. I pray for eyes to see his fingerprints more often.