Scripture:  Galatians 3:23-29

In Harper Lee’s famous book To Kill a Mockingbird the character Atticus Finch says, “You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family.”  Almost instantly, this idea became adopted as an “old saying” like a modern-day proverb.  The idea that you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family may have been accepted as wisdom when the book was published in 1960, but today it is an idea that would be heavily disputed.  Across media, the found family trope has become incredibly popular.  Unless you just stay away from reading books, watching TV shows, or viewing movies then you have probably encountered this.  The found family trope is the belief that one can in fact choose one’s family, and often the main character does just that throughout the course of the story.  One of the strongest examples of this trope is the Fast and Furious franchise, which has included eleven different movies over the course of 21 years.  The whole concept of found family is perhaps best summed up in a line from one of the movies where the actor Vin Diesel’s character Dom says “I don’t have friends.  I have family.”  

The trope of found family is ubiquitous in entertainment media today, but that is likely because it reflects realities of culture today.   For instance, for the past decade “friendsgiving” has risen in popularity compared to the more traditional thanksgiving.  Friendsgiving is all about celebrating and being thankful for the people you choose.  A 2023 survey found that 40% of adults under 40 planned on being part of a friendsgiving celebration.  It would seem that large portions of our culture disagree with Harper Lee and believe you can choose your family.  Of course, the idea is nothing new, and it is in fact biblical.  This morning’s scripture is a prime example.   Multiple times it the New Testament we find ideas put forth like the one in this morning’s scripture.  Being a disciple of Jesus is being part of God’s found family.  The phrase “church family” is commonplace today, but when Paul wrote this morning’s scripture it would have been revolutionary.  In this morning’s scripture we find that not only do we find our family in Christ, but we should find our very identity.  

Many of the letters that Paul wrote were to specific churches in specific cities such as Corinth, Rome, or Ephesus.   Galatians, where this morning’s scripture comes from, is a bit different in that it was written to a region.  Galatia was a Roman province which Paul traveled in and established churches in this area.  This letter was written with the intent of traveling around to multiple churches in the area, and it was written for a specific purpose.  Apparently, some individuals had come to this area with a radically different viewpoint than Paul’s.  These individuals were Jewish Christians who believed that the Old Testament Jewish law applied to all followers of Jesus, and that one could not be a Christian unless they followed specific Jewish rites as prescribe in the law.   Paul strongly argues against this viewpoint, and one of his central arguments is found in this morning’s scripture. 

 The Jewish Christians who were attempting to get the Galatians to follow Jewish customs argued that it was through following the law that one was in right relationship with God, but Paul believed a relationship with God was found through faith.   This is stated in verse 26: “So, in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.”  Paul is not just using flowery language.  He is not making an emotional appeal, but rather he is making an legal argument.   We stopped reading at verse 29 this morning, but Paul’s thought continues and in 4:4-5 he wrote, “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those under the law that we might receive adoption to sonship.”

Under the Old Testament law, the relationship between God was built upon the law.  The condition of being God’s people is that the Israelites followed the law.  They were God’s people by virtue of having the law.  The Judaizers were telling the Galatians that Jesus did not change this, to be God’s people they still had to follow customs and rites outlined in the Torah.   Yet, Paul was consistently insistent that because of Jesus Christ the equation has been changed.  Through faith in Christ the relationship is not as God’s people, the relationship is now as God’s children.   The relationship is not dependent on following the law, the relationship is dependent on Christ alone.  Moreover, this is because through Christ God has adopted us.   Following the law to be God’s people, is dependent upon our actions, but being adopted by God as a child God, is dependent upon God’s actions.  It is brought about by God’s choice.   We are children of God, because God chooses us, God wants us, God loves us, and God has proven this love through the death and resurrection of his only begotten son Jesus Christ.     
   
God does not want our worship; God does not need our sacrifices.  What God wants is us.   God wants to be your Father.  God, the creator of the universe, the source of all that is good, the being that defines eternity and exceeds infinity, wants you to be their child. The beauty of this foundational truth cannot be overstated.  The simple elegance of it should not be overlooked or taken for granted.  In fact, this truth should be a foundational one for us.  It should go as far as informing who we understand ourselves to be.  Paul put forth the same idea when he wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” 
The primary idea here is that our identity is found first and foremost found through Christ.   This means that when we stare at ourselves in the mirror, the person we see, the person we fundamentally understand ourselves to be above all else is a child of God.   This is a point of commonality and connection we share with all others who claim Jesus as savior.  Following or not following Jewish customs was causing division among the churches in Galatia, and Paul impressed upon them that they should look to their identity in Christ above those as Jews or Gentiles.   We are all God’s children and this core, common identity should be stronger than any difference that we might have.  Unfortunately, as followers of Jesus there are a couple of ways we have struggled to get this right.    

One of the ways we misstep is that we confuse what unity means.   What unites us all is that we are children of God through faith in Christ Jesus.   Consistently we end up confusing this with meaning, Christians must be uniform in certain beliefs and practices.   This is what gave birth to Christian fundamentalism at the beginning of the 20th century.  Fundamentalism, which still lingers to this day, attempted to define what were the fundamentals of Christianity.  The flip side to this was considering anyone who did not agree with these doctrines fully as not a real Christian.    This confusion is also why every four years when there is a presidential election, a whole bunch of people will shout about how you can not be a true Christian if you vote for a specific candidate.  Unity does not mean uniformity.  What unites us is Christ.   I think John Wesley, the found of the Methodist movement said it best.  Wesley lived in a time when the religious motivated wars and conflict in Europe were only a few generations removed from his time.  Wesley also had some fundamental theological disagreements with his friend and fellow preacher George Whitfield, yet Wesely believed that the saving grace of Jesus was greater than all of these religious differences of opinions.  In his sermon, Catholic Spirit, Wesley preached, “Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt, we may. Herein all the children of God may unite, notwithstanding these smaller differences.”

We are part of God’s family, because God wants us to be.   The family of God is big and the family of God is diverse.   The kind of Christian unity that Paul writes about, is not found by ignoring our differences.   It is not found by trying to all conform to one ideal.  It is found by seeing, claiming, and celebrating the vast diversity that is already found in the kingdom of God.  Because I promise you, you are going to spend eternity with people who do not look like you, who do not think like you, who do not believe like you, and who do not quite fit your mold of what you think a Christian should be.   God’s family is diverse and varied already.  Becoming a Christian does not erase that diversity.  Paul’s original audience in Galatia did not stop being Jew or gentile, male or female when they became Christians.  The differences and uniqueness remained.     The secret to Christian unity is to accept and celebrate that diversity.   God has adopted us into God’s family, and that is true of every single other person who professes Jesus as savior.  The secret to Christian unity is that we recognize this and we also choose one another as siblings in Christ.  The church is our found family. 

This means that when we cannot think alike, we choose to love alike.  It means when we encounter someone who does not quite fit the mold we are used to, we  do not seek to change them, but we seek to make space for them by loving them sincerely without question with a love that is deep from the heart.  When someone does not quite what we expect we do not exclude them instead we draw the circle wider still.  We expand our table to make room.  I like the analogy that John Pavalovitz uses in his book A Bigger Table.  He wrote about when there were large family gatherings the solution to fitting everyone was to go the garage and get the leaf which was added to literally make the table bigger.  Pavalovitz wrote, “We made room we didn’t have before.  This was a regular incarnation of the love of God right in the center of our home. . .This is the heart of the gospel: the ever-expanding hospitality of God.  Jesus, after all, was a carpenter.  Building bigger tables was right in his wheelhouse.”

 For me this is the best image of what it means to be in the family of God.  A big table, gathered together in love, breaking bread, telling stories, and enjoying being with one another.  It is a table full of different people, different colors, different opinions, and different lifestyles.   Yet the one thing that unites everyone is that they have a place at the table, this is the place where they belong, this is their family.   And what makes the table in the kingdom of God so special and so beautiful, is that there is always space to pull up one more chair. 

 In the province of Galatia there was division because some people sought to impose uniformity.   Paul wrote this morning’s scripture to offer a different vision of unity, a vision of unity that is based in our relationship with God through Christ Jesus.  We are adopted by God, which means we are siblings with all other Christians.   We are not here, because of who we are, we are here because of whose we are.  So may we find our identity in Christ.  May we claim adoption by God and our place in God’s family.   May that be what unites us above all else.   May we claim all of believers as our siblings in Christ as we celebrate the diversity of God’s family.   And may we draw the circle wide, because there is always room for one more.  

Scripture:  Acts 2:1-21

There are a lot of sports fans.   In fact, it is estimated that close to half the world’s population consider themselves fans of what we call soccer and the rest of the world calls football.  It seems that one of the universals to the human experience that crosses cultural and economic lines is a love for sports.  There is something wired into being human that drives us to compete and to cheer on others in competition.    Many of you no doubt consider yourselves a sports fan.  Perhaps, you are a long-suffering Cubs fan hoping that this might once again be their year, or maybe you are just counting the days until the boilermakers get back onto the football field, or perhaps you are all set to root on the Pacers to win game 2 tonight.  Whatever it is for you, many of us have a sport or team that we are a fan of.   But there are sports fans, and then there are superfans.  Perhaps you know someone like this, but if not you might have seen them on TV at some point. 

The super fans miss as few of the games as they can for their chosen team in their chosen sport.  They will be there in stands, decked head to toe in their team’s colors and they might even paint their face to match.   They will be among the loudest in the stands.  Super fans are not fair-weather fans.  In the worst seasons, they still show up with just as much enthusiasm as the winning seasons.   The homes of these fans might look like a museum dedicated to their team, and their knowledge of their team is encyclopedic, containing the most obscure details from decades ago.  For most people being a sports fan is part of their lives, but for superfans it is their life.  Their team is what they have built their lives around.  They are primarily known by their team affiliation above all else.  Being a fan of their team is who they are. 

This morning’s scripture is when the Jesus’ original disciples make the final step in being superfans for Christ.  From this point on sharing the good news of Jesus Christ was their whole life, it became the singular passion they built their lives around, it is what they became known for above all else, and ultimately it is what they would die for.  Sports super fans are fired up for their team, they are loud about it, and they don’t care who knows it.  In the same way, it was in this morning’s scripture that the disciples got literally fired up for Jesus as the Holy Spirit descended.  They were loud about the good news, they wanted everyone to know it, and their passion for the gospel changed the world.  The Holy Spirit came down on Pentecost, but it never left.  Today the Spirit can still empower, it can still get the followers of Jesus fired up, and if we allow it the Spirit can enable us to transform the world still. 

This morning’s scripture really is a great story.   As they were instructed, the disciples are waiting.  Jesus promised the Holy Spirit and they were waiting for what was going to come next.  It came in a way that was unmistakable and as dramatically as possible.  I think it is easy for us to overlook some of the drama of this scripture.  Verse 2 states the disciples were in a house when the Spirit suddenly descended upon them.  Jerusalem was full of Jews from all over the known world for the festival, but it is not like they were just milling around outside the house.  No, the blowing of wind, the coming of tongue of fire, the speaking in all of the different languages created a scene, it drew a curious crowd to see what the commotion was about.   I imagine that what they found is more than what they bargained for, because they found miracles at work.   They heard the various disciples proclaiming the good news in a variety of languages.  This means everyone there heard the language they understood as well as several they did not.  When I imagine this scene, I also see the tones the disciples are talking in as excitable and enthusiastic.  It was incredible, which is why some people tried to rationalize away what they were seeing as the result of too much day drinking. 

However, speaking in tongues was not the only empowerment of the Holy Spirit they observed.  Peter stood up to address the crowd and delivered a sermon, connecting to the words of the prophet Joel.  Now, up to this point there had been zero indication that Peter had any skill at rhetoric or public speaking.  In fact, in the gospels it is the opposite.  In the gospels he excels at sticking his foot in his mouth.  Yet, Acts 2:41 claims that after Peter finished talking 3,000 people accepted the message that day.  Just like the other disciples miraculously spoke in languages they did not know, Peter’s words changed the hearts of thousands because of the empowerment of the Holy Spirit.   While some of this empowerment, like speaking in tongues, was supernatural in nature, part of the way that the Holy Spirit empowered was more commonplace but still extraordinary.   It is a way that all of us can and perhaps should experience the Spirit’s empowerment today. 

In the gospel of John, during the last supper, Jesus promises his disciples that after he is gone, the Holy Spirit will come.  In John Chapter 14, verse 25 we find Jesus saying these words: “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will sed in my name, will teach you all thing and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”  So yes, the disciples spoke in languages they did not know, but what the spoke was the good new of Jesus Christ.  Yes, Peter was empowered by the Holy Spirit so that his words changed hearts, but what he said was the truth that had already changed his own heart.   Part of the way that the Holy Spirit empowered on that Pentecost, is that it fired the disciples up.  It reminded them of everything Jesus had said, it pumped them up, and they could not be silent.  

The Holy Spirit still works this way in our lives.  The Holy Spirit is the still small voice that reminds us of who Jesus is, and who we are because of who Jesus is.  It is the Holy Spirit that there is to remind us of the good news that changed our lives.  In our hardest times, in our darkest times, when we are at our most tired, or even our most apathetic, when we are exhausted, numb, and can’t feel a thing it is the Holy Spirit that reminds us that we are loved and that God has proven this love through Jesus Christ.   When we feel alone, like we don’t quite have a place, that we don’t belong- it is the holy Spirit that reminds us that because of Jesus Christ sacrifice on our behalf, we belong to the family of God, our names are in the book of life, and there is a place for us.   When we feel lost it is the Holy Spirit that reminds us that because of the amazing grace of our lord and savior Jesus Christ, we are found.   The Holy Spirit reminds us that we have a reason for hope that can not be crushed, we have a reason for joy that can not be extinguished, because Jesus has conquered sin and death, the grave has lost its sting, and because of Christ there will be dwell in God’s heavenly kingdom- a world without end- forever, and ever, and ever.  

 If we have ears to hear and take the time to listen, then the Holy Spirit will remind us of what Jesus taught, it will remind us of the gospel, and it will remind us the good news. Friends, that should get us fired up.   Sports fans, especially sports super fans, are known for how enthusiastic they are for their team. Why do we tend not to have the same level of excitement and enthusiasm about living out our faith and worshipping our savior as we do with sports teams?    Sports fans get swept up in the joy of cheering for and hoping their team wins.   As followers of Christ, we should be swept up in the infinitely exciting, never-ending love of God.   Given all of that, our worship services should be as enthusiastic as the pre-game tailgate parties.  Why aren’t they?

 Sports fans, especially super fans, make the big game their highest priority.  It is the highlight of the week, that everything else is built around.  Why do we tend not to have the same level of excitement and enthusiasm about living out our faith and worshipping our savior as we do with sports teams?    I remember back in the mid 2000’s when the Colts were at the height of popularity and success.  If the colts played a 1PM game, then it was a given that 11AM church services were going to be lightly attended.  In the same way during those years, if the Colts played at 4PM, then I knew youth group would only have a handful of non-football watching students.  Skipping church for the big game was just expected.   Why do we not skip the big game for church?    Why is the idea of even doing that laughable? 

The Holy Spirit works in our lives to remind us about the good news of Jesus, and just like sports fans are enthusiastic about their teams, we should be enthusiastic about the gospel.   In this morning’s scripture the disciples get the Holy Spirit and they are full of enthusiasm, they go wild sharing about Jesus and create a huge scene.  Because of the Holy Spirit the disciples were known for the enthusiasm for Jesus, and long that that was true for Methodists as well.  Years ago, someone pointed out to me a fascinating aspect in American Sign Language.   In ASL, this is the sign for Methodist.  The fascinating piece is that there is another word in sign language that uses the same sign.    The sign for enthusiasm is the same thing.   When the etymology of sign language was developing throughout the 19th and early 20th century, there was a clear connection between being a Methodist and being enthusiastic.  For all the reasons already stated, we should be enthusiastic about our faith. We should listen to the Holy Spirit and be fired up!

The disciples fired up on Pentecost, and by the end of the day there were 3,000 more believers.   The early church experienced explosive growth and a large part of this is because being filled with the Holy Spirit the disciples were enthusiastic about sharing Jesus.  There is a quote that often gets misattributed to John Wesley.  He did not say it, but it very much emerged out of the Methodist tradition that states, “set yourself on fire with enthusiasm and people will come from miles to watch you burn.”  Like the original disciples, we should not be shy about the passion and enthusiasm we have for Jesus Christ.  Because Jesus is good news, and this world is desperate for good news.   Through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, this good news changed hearts and minds, and it can still do the exact same thing today.  Through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit the original disciples shared their passion and enthusiasm so that they were disciples who make disciples.  We can rely on the Holy Spirit to do the same thing today. 

Today we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit.  We celebrate that the promises Jesus made were fulfilled when the Spirit descended like tongues of fire, but we also celebrate that the Holy Spirit never left.  We celebrate that just like it did for the original disciples, the Holy Spirit can work in our lives to remind us about Jesus, to remind us the good news.  We celebrate that the Holy Spirit can rekindle our passion for following Christ.   Once for the people called Methodists it was our enthusiasm for loving Jesus that defined who we are, and by the empowerment of the Holy Spirit may that be so again.  May we listen to the Spirit, and may we get fired up.
 
 

Scripture:  Acts 16:16-34

Murphy’s law, named after rocket engineer Edward Murphy Jr, states “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Now technically, this is not a scientific law it is a somewhat pessimistic adage.  But If you have lived enough life, chances are you have a day that went so badly that it felt like an experiment to prove just how true Murphy’s law is.   From time to time we all have bad days, and when I have a bad day I remind myself that it could be worse.  I think that tends to be true for most of us, but that probably was not true for Tsutomu Yamaguchi.  He worked as a marine engineer for Mitsubishi in Japan during World War II.  In the summer of 1945, he had spent several months away from home on an extended business trip to work on the design for an oil tanker.   He had finished his work and was set to go home on August 6th, 1945.  Unfortunately, for Yamaguchi the city he was leaving was Hiroshima.  He was two miles from ground zero of the atomic blast, and he managed to take cover in a ditch which likely saved his life.   Despite surviving, he did suffer severe burns.   He had to walk through the destroyed city, and against all odds found a train station still operating.  Even better for Yamaguchi, one of the destinations this train was heading towards was home.  Tsutomu Yamaguchi stepped off the train in his hometown of Nagasaki.   He was at a hospital being treated for his injuries when the second atomic bomb dropped.   Fortunately, he survived that one too making him the only person to live through two atomic blasts.   Fortunately for me, I have never had a day that bad. 

It can be helpful for me to remind myself it could be worse, but it is also helpful to remind myself having a bad day is not a competition.   Just because someone might have it worse, it does not negate how we feel.  We are all allowed to have bad days.  There are a lot of reasons why we can feel down and why we can have bad days.  Life can be hard.  It can be full of setbacks, mishaps, and darkness.  Sometimes all of this culminates in creating a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.   This morning’s scripture comes from one of Paul’s bad days.  It was a day where things seemed to keep going from bad to worse.  How Paul and Silas reacted to having a terrible day can give us guidance for when it has not been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

This morning’s scripture takes place during Paul’s second missionary journey.  He is in the city of Philippi, and it would be hard to come up with a worse day than Paul had.  The whole thing got off to a rocky start.   For days, this girl with a spirit possessing her, had been an annoyance for Paul and his companions.  It seemed that Paul was willing to leave well enough alone.  Yes, this girl was troubled by a spirit, and she was suffering the injustice of slavery, but it seemed Paul was going to let those issues be while he focused on other matters.  However, the girl’s constant shouting at them troubled Paul to the point that he did something about it and cast the spirit out. 

 This is a point I think we can all relate to Paul.  Because while we may never had a possessed girl following us around shouting at us nonstop, we have all been in situations where we let little annoyances get to us.  We have all been in  situations where all of the little things add up, and something that should have not been that big of a deal pushes us over the edge.  We end up exploding at something silly or we shut down, ugly crying over something that should have been nothing.  Like Paul, we have all been there.  Unfortunately, for Paul the fallout of his actions led to his day getting worse. 

Casting out the Sprit was a good and right thing, especially for the afflicted girl.  For Paul it seems no good deed goes unpunished, because others did not see this way.  This morning’s scripture explains how a whole crowd got whipped up against Paul.  One thing led to another and spiraled out of control until they were arrested and as the scripture states, “the magistrate ordered them to be stripped and beaten.”   There is a lot of pain implied in that sentence.    Roman flogging used a small whip that consisted of multiple lashes attached to one crop, and these lashes often had small pieces of metal, glass, or shell imbedded in them.  These extra bits made the whips, exceptionally effective at tearing the skin.   This was a punishment that the Roman empire did not inflict upon their citizens but saved it for non-citizens.  There was no standard to how this punishment was administered, so we do not know how badly Paul and Silas were beaten in this scripture.  The intention of flogging was not to kill, but Roman writers referred to flogging as “the half death.”   It was not uncommon for people to survive the punishment but die in the aftermath from a combination of physical shock, blood loss, or infection.   While the scripture does not dwell on the gruesome details, Paul received much more than a slap on the wrist, and he certainly bore the scars from that day for the rest of his life. 

After all of that, Paul and Silas are then thrown into prison and while they are there an earthquake hits.  Of course, from there things do turn around for Paul and Silas.  However, it is fair to say that being beaten, ending up in prison and then being released via earthquake is probably not how Paul and Silas saw their day going.  It was, by any objective measure, a bad day.   While hopefully very few of us have days that bad, we have all had days that we ended up wishing we never got out of bed for.  We have days where nothing seems to go right.   We may never have experienced being flogged like Paul did, but we all have days that hurt.  A lot.  We all have days that have left scars, even if the scars are not physical.   Like Paul we have all had bad days, which is why we can learn from how Paul responded.  Specifically, there are two things we can learn about what to do when we have a bad day.  

 We find Paul’s response to having such a terrible day in verse 25: “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God.”  Despite all that Paul had been through he was still praising God.  And why shouldn’t he?   If God is worth praising when things are going well then God is worth praising when we have a bad day.  We should praise God in the storm, because God does not change.  What makes God worthy of our praise is always the same.  This is not to say that we have to make sure we always stay on the sunny side of life.  Praising God amid bad days, is not forced positivity for the sake of positivity.   We can still feel what we feel.  We can still have bad days and feel sad, angry, or hurt.   Yet, It is always appropriate to praise God, even if we do so through the tears, even if we do so with clenched fist, and even if all we can manage is a whisper.

When we have a bad day, or when we are in the middle of a string of bad days, we can follow Paul’s lead here and we can praise God.  We should do this because it is always good and right to praise God.  Doing so, will not magically make our day better but it will remind us that this bad day is not everything.  Praising God will remind us that there is only rainbow after a storm, and that dawn only follows the darkest part of night.  

Paul praise God, but he does not stop there.   The other thing that Paul does during a bad day, in addition to praising God, was being open to be used by God to be a blessing to others.  Paul and Silas were not the only ones who had a bad day in this morning’s scripture.  The unnamed jail keeper also ended up having a bad day.  Verse 23 states that after Paul and Silas were thrown into prison the jailer was “commanded to guard them carefully.”   After the earthquake caused the doors of the jail to open and the chains to fall off the prisoners, this man was going to literally fall on his own sword because he thought death was his best possible outcome from this.   Yet, Paul somehow managed to get all of the prisoners to stay put.  This jailer had been moments from death, and in response to learning that his worst fears had not happened, we can read verse 29 of this morning’s scripture: “The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked “Sirs what must I do to be saved?” 

 Despite being harassed, arrested, beaten, and thrown into prison Paul was still open to the spirit’s leading and because of that the jailer and his whole family were saved.   We can learn from Paul’s openness here.  When things are not going our way, and we have a bad day, we tend to get very insular and focus with tunnel vision on ourselves.  Yet, we can still be used by God even when we are not at 100%.  Even when we are down or frustrated, or things just are not going our way God can still use us to be a blessing to others.   Even if we ourselves are not having the best of days, we can still be a blessing to someone else who might be going through their own bad day. 
 
I know this is the case, because on one especially bad day I once had there was a stranger who was an amazing blessing to us.  This bad day was right at twenty two years ago.   Abigal and I had been married for less than a week.  For a honeymoon we spent a few days in the Smokey Mountains outside of Gatlinburg.  The trouble started as we began to head home.   I did not know a lot about cars, and I still do not know a lot about cars, but I knew the noise the car was making was really, really not right. I knew engines were not supposed to rev that high while going that slow.   This was in the era before smart phones so it was not like we could just look up where the closest mechanic was.  In Maryville, TN we happened to spot a mechanic’s garage and we pulled in.  We showed up in the middle of the day with a busted car at a busy mechanics shop, and after explaining our situation they immediately looked at the car.   The transmission was shot and for the car to make the journey back to Indiana it would have to be replaced.   Even though we were not on the schedule for the day this shop made us a priority.  They called local junkyards, found a transmission, and sent someone to get it.   From the time they left to get the part to the time they were done was just over three hours.   They truly made our car the priority to get done.   They replaced our car’s entire transmission for $700.  At the time that seemed like so much money, but in hindsight I now know they charged us for the part at cost.   We were only twenty-two, we had only graduated college two weeks prior, we were over 300 miles from home, and the only directions we had were on a printed piece of paper from MapQuest, and we were in a car that had something deeply wrong with it.  It was a bad day, but some incredibly kind mechanics took pity on some newlywed kids. 

 Yet, it was not just good luck on our part.  Years later, after smart phones and google became a thing, I used the Internet to track down that mechanic’s shop.  On their website it stated that they are a proud Christian owned business.  We avoided what could have been a terrible, horrible, no good, really bad day because followers of Jesus showed Christlike mercy and kindness on us.  If we have eyes to see how and where the Spirit is leading us, then we too can be a blessing to someone else.  We can be someone else’s answer to prayer.  Even if we are amid our own stuff, God can use us to be the remedy for someone else’s bad day.  
 
Paul had a bad day, but he praised God anyway.  He had a bad day, but he was open to the Spirit’s leading.  May we seek to learn from this.  If you hre having a bad day or a bad week, or even a bad month.  Then I’m sorry you are going through this.  Remember, it is a bad day not a bad life.   It will get better, and I can promise you that throughout it all God will be there every step of the way.   So may we praise God from who all blessing flow.   May we seek to be a blessing for someone else so that they may be filled with joy.