God’s Plan: Part II

contributed by Adam T.

 God has blessed me by putting some truly amazing people in my life.  There have been so many times in my life where if I wanted to see God working in it I only had to look as far as the person standing next to me.  This is part two in what I hope will be a three part series.  I wanted to use this particular one to share with you some of the people God has brought into my life and how those relationships have enhanced my life.

 I could not have chosen a better set of parents to be born to.  Their faith, strength, compassion, love and humor have been a source of inspiration from the very beginning.  My father is a pharmacist with a brilliant mind and a wonderful sense of humor.  He once caught a doctor’s misplaced decimal point on a prescription that would have given a patient ten times the dose he was supposed to have had.  It would have killed the patient had my father not caught the error.  I went to a private catholic school for a number of years when I was growing up.  Every once in a while I would have to hand-deliver the tuition check to a nun in the office.  When I was in the third grade my father had given me the check to drop off and told me to hand it over to the nun and ask then her if I was catholic now.  I just cannot look back at the memory without smiling.  My mother has more strength then anyone I have ever met.  She has worked as an oncology nurse for a number of years.  The work is difficult and at times heartbreaking.  In order to treat people with cancer they have to literally poison them in hopes of killing the cancer cells and not the patient.  There are times when no matter how hard they try it is just that patient’s time.  I have had the opportunity to briefly watch my mother work at her job.  I have never seen such warmth and compassion in another human being as I have seen in my mother.  No matter the situation she always has a warm smile and a kind word to those she is interacting with.  I have spoken to some of the patients that she has treated and the families of patients.  The thing that kept coming up was they would tell me that my mother had been an angel in their time of need.  I believe it. 

 When I was growing up and going through some of the more extreme procedures my parents were always there.  They made sure that I had the best doctors and nurses.  A lot of children who go in for surgery are scared of the hospital because they are not familiar with it.  I was so comfortable whenever I went in for a procedure.  It was not unfamiliar or scary to me it was just where my parents worked.  When I was 15 years old and had my jaw surgically broken and wired together the first people I saw when I woke up in recovery were my parents.  My mother had made sure that I had everything I needed and my father was there with a poster that had two penguins on it.  One of the penguins had it’s head completely swallowed by a large fish that stuck up in the air, which was about how I felt at the time, the penguin without the fish on his head was saying, “Relax God’s in Charge.”  They are one of the many blessings that God has given me in this life.  The foundation of their example and God is what I have used to build my life upon.

 I met Brian my freshmen year in college at Michigan State University.  It was difficult for me to make friends because I was so shy.  In high school I had only two close friends Dave and Greg.  I had my first set of dentures less then a year before I headed off for college and still saw myself as the kid who was constantly teased growing up.  The first two weeks of college I only left my dorm room to go to class, go to work and go to the cafeteria to eat.  I was so afraid of people and what they might say or do.  I did not talk to anyone unless I absolutely had to.  I had a job at the bookstore in software and supplies it was there that I found myself working beside Brian.  I believe that there are times in our lives when God just opens doors for us.  I walked up to Brian and found all the fear just drop away.  My lack of self-esteem just dissolved and I was instantly put at ease around him.  We started talking and at some point I had asked him what he was going to do that weekend.  He told me that he had a math class on Saturday but after that he was just going to hang out.  Brian then asked me what I was going to do that weekend and without hesitating I said, “Oh I’m going to sacrifice something nasty to the god rodan.”  It was a joke and not very funny but Brian could not help but laugh.  I was in shock.  I did not talk to people as easily as I talked to him and I never joked around new people ever.  I was just at ease and God had opened that door for me. 

 Brian was the first authentic Christian I had ever met outside of my parents.  I was brought up in the Methodist church and had found myself surrounded by hypocrites.  People who would say one thing on church on Sunday and then go out the rest of the week and do the opposite only to return to church the next week and repeat the cycle.  They did not see anything wrong with this behavior and I did so I left the church and turned away from God.  At that time in my life I figured if God could let this happen in his church I did not want any part of it.  God however would not turn his back on me.  Brian is a sinner but he never pretended that he was not.  He taught me so much about having a personal relationship with God separate from the church.  Along with this he taught me the importance of fellowship with other Christians and that the two, God and religion, were separate entities.  God was not religion and religion was not God but they worked together quite well. 

 Brian has such a strong personal relationship with God and I could see it in how he lives his life.  Brian never tried to force his beliefs on me and he never once looked down on me or judged me because I was not a Christian at the time.  He saved me just by being in my life and being the Christian that he is.  We have known each other for almost fourteen years and have been the best of friends for that long as well.

 Towards the end of my freshmen year in college I lost a good friend from high school, Greg, to suicide.  I was 18 years old and had never dealt with anything that difficult in my entire life.  I leaned on Brian and was never let down.  Brian prayed for me continually during one of the roughest parts of my life.  Fall of that year I was supposed to be getting ready for another surgery and I was anything but ready.  I had dated a girl over the summer back in my hometown and she had broken up with me a few weeks after class started.  I was still trying to cope with Greg’s death and found myself in a state of depression.  Brian dragged me into the weight room one day and we started lifting weights.  The next morning he got me up early and dragged me into the weight room again.  I hated lifting weights.  I had never done it before and I hurt afterwards for days.  Brian would not take no for an answer and kept dragging me down there to lift before we had to leave for class.   I was less than enthusiastic about it and was shaken awake a number of times when I would doze off on a weight bench.  Brian never complained about my lack of enthusiasm and he never got angry with me when I would argue about not wanting to work out.  He would just stand there until I worked it out of my system and then we would head down to the weight room. 

 We hung out all the time that fall and winter and would just talk late into the night about God and life and anything that came to us.  Sometimes we would leave the dorms and walk up to Grand River Avenue and the thirty-one flavors for ice cream not saying more than a few words between us.  I never told Brian that I was down and I never told him that I was hurting.  He just knew and he knew exactly what I needed.  When it came time for the surgery that winter I was in the best shape of my life and I was mentally prepared for what was about to happen.  The surgeon who performed the operation was amazed at how quickly I was able to recover from having a section of my hip removed and graphed on to my face.  I was up and walking the next day with help and little pain.  I owe all that to Brian and to God. 

 I saw a quote the other day that said, “A friend will help you move, a true friend will help you move bodies.”  Brian is a true friend and over the years we have been there for each other through the good times as well as the bad.  If you are wondering we have never moved bodies for each other.  God had brought the perfect person into my life at the perfect time.  Brian brought me back to God just by being the wonderful person that he is.  He was the example and the brother that I needed right when I needed him the most.     

 I met my wife the first time I had ever been drunk in my entire life.  As a rule I do not drink.  I had my first sip of beer when I was almost 22 years old.  I just never saw the attraction to getting drunk even when I was not a Christian.  So my tolerance for alcohol is nonexistent.  When I moved to Chicago to start film school Brian got a job in the area and we shared an apartment.  It was the summer of 1999 and I was preparing for a film that I would be shooting that October.  The script called for a half bottle of Jack Daniels and the store did not sell half bottles of Jack.  So I had purchased a $15 dollar bottle and being the frugal student that I was I did not want to pour half of it down the drain.  So Brian and I decided to drink half the bottle.  I started out with 90% Cola and 10% Jack.  At that rate Brian had told me that it would take us until October to get down to half a bottle.  So then it was a 50/50 mixture and by the end of the night we were doing straight shots of gentleman Jack.  I tottered off to bed and lay down only to find that the room would not stop spinning.  I realized that if I lay there for much longer the Jack Daniels I had ingested was going to make a second appearance so I got up and decided to find someone online to talk to.  I just wanted something to take my attention off the fact that the room was spinning.  I signed on and did a search for someone who liked to read.  I love to read and thought it would be a great thing to talk about until I sobered up a bit.  I ran across a screen name that had sunny in the title and figured that since it was the middle of the night I could use a little sunshine.  So I sent an instant message and said something like hello.  Sunny responded back and we started chatting online.  Sunny was of course my future wife Rebecca and we spent several hours just talking.  She was impressed that I was not hitting on her.  I always joke with her and tell her that it was because I was holding on the desk trying not to fall off the earth.  I explained to her that I was drunk, the reason why I was drunk and the fact that I had never been drunk before.  She was okay with it and surprised that I would admit such a thing.  Had I not been drinking that night we might have never met.  I think though that God would have found another way to bring us together. 

 Over the next few months we chatted online and exchanged e-mails.  A few months later we had our first date and met face to face for the first time.  I have never seen anyone so beautiful.  A week later we had our second date and our first kiss.  From the start of our relationship I had told Rebecca that I did not want to get married until I had finished film school.  A year and a half after we had met I was preparing to shoot my thesis film.  The time had just flown by.  Rebecca was such a kind and supportive person and we just fit together.  We took a walk in the woods where we had shared our first kiss.  Rebecca was talking about how nervous I must have been.  I was thinking about how nervous I was at that moment with the engagement ring burning a hole in my pocket.  We reached the spot we had our first kiss and stopped to share another.  I told her that I needed to tie my shoe and dropped down to one knee.  I pulled the ring box out and opened it.  After which I waited for her to look down.  Eventually she looked down to see what was taking me so long thinking that I was getting the knee of my pants soaked with water and saw me looking up at her.  I asked her if she would marry me and she said yes.  I had told her that I did not want to get married until after I had finished school but what I did not tell her was that I did not mind a long engagement. 

 That summer I shot my thesis film in Michigan.  I was having a horrible time on the shoot.  I was away from Rebecca and everything that could go wrong did go wrong.  It was August and about 98 degrees in the shade.  The first day of shooting took place in a lobby that was about fifteen degrees hotter than everywhere else it was like standing in a greenhouse.  After 10 hours of shooting we drove over to the hotel that we were staying at and found out that they had set up our stay for three years from the day we had requested when we had made the reservation.  I found myself crammed into a single room with the entire crew and not enough beds to go around.  When I called the front desk for a cot they told me they would send one up when one became available.   While this was going on the police surrounded the hotel and shot and killed a fugitive they had been hunting for who just happened to have a room down from us.  After the ambulance crew rolled the body out I watched in horror as they rolled the cot out of the room past the yellow police tape and to our door.  I had serious thoughts about canceling the production and heading back to Chicago to rethink the whole project.   

 Rebecca showed up, as I was about to pack up and leave.  She had rented a car and drove all the way to Michigan to surprise me.  She only stayed for a few days of what would be a ten-day project but everything just turned around once she arrived.  Rebecca was so supportive and it just made me love her all that much more.  I completed the shoot on time and under budget, which had never happened to me on a film shoot before.  The following summer I finished editing the film and was awarded my graduate degree.

 In September we were married after being engaged for a year and a half.  At that point we had known each other for three years.  Our wedding was one of the most incredible events of my life.  I had been told ever since I had asked Rebecca to marry me that the wedding was going to be an insane event that would cause so much stress.  I have never been so calm in my entire life.  I woke up the morning of our wedding in a state of complete peace.  When I saw Rebecca at our wedding ceremony it was like seeing her again for the very first time.  I felt God’s presence at that moment stronger than I ever have.  I felt that us getting married pleased God so much and that his love happiness was everywhere. 

 I had imagined growing up what the person I would marry would be like.  In my wildest imagination I never dreamed of anyone as close to how wonderful Rebecca is.  I cannot image my life without her.  God brought us together and I see his glory in our relationship each and every day.           

 Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the Glory of God?”  John 10:40

 My life has been filled with the love and glory of God.  I just never realized it until I began to actively seek him.  His love for us is infinite.  How have the people God has brought into your life enriched it and have you told them lately how much they mean to you?