When I was in my early twenties I worked in the fish business as a salesman. I was at the end of my rope with two bosses that hated each other. I was accountable to both of them for different parts of my job, and they were making my life miserable in an attempt to hurt each other. I prayed one night about this because I didn’t know what I should do. I didn’t have enough money to quit and keep paying rent. And I didn’t have enough time to outside of work to start looking for another job. But here is the other thing that I recognized; I really wasn’t trusting God for anything other than my eternal salvation. In other words, I had what I have come to call “fire insurance” faith. And so I prayed, “I know that I have not trusted you for anything, but I believe that you are real. I need to hear you speak to me because I don’t know what to do.” And right at that moment a word dropped into my mind. It was the word stumble. I was lead to a verse in the Psalms that said, “If the Lord delights in a man’s ways he will make his steps firm; though he stumble he will not fall, for the Lord will uphold him with his hand.” I just knew that that verse was God’s word to me. The challenge in it was that it meant that God wanted me to trust him with more than just “life after death,” and he would “show me what to do.” He wanted me to trust him with all kinds of things in my life right now. As I went to sleep that night, I was so excited that I now knew what God wanted and that he would “make my steps firm.”
Guess what happened when I woke up the next morning. Do you think I was still excited? I’ll tell you what went through my head. Was that really God, or was I just overly emotional because I was tired? What did I have to eat for dinner – was it overly spicy? I began to try to rationalize away what I had believed by faith the night before. Because I couldn’t see it or prove it, maybe it wasn’t real. And yet, I could see my two mean spirited bosses in my imagination very clearly. They were real.
And then I went to the fridge to get the milk out for my cereal and noticed a piece of paper that was attached to the door by a magnet. It was a page from a Bible, in fact it was a King James version of the Bible. It was a photocopy of a page from the psalms. Psalm 37, actually. And one verse was highlighted with a yellow highlight pen. I’ll bet you can guess which one it was. “If the Lord delights in a man’s ways, he will make his steps firm; though he stumble he will not fall, for the Lord will uphold him with his hand.” It turns out that my Dad had put it there when he came over to clean my apartment. But through him, God made visible something that was invisible to me. He gave me a sign, that what he had said, was true, and that I needed to trust what He had said. That moment was a turning point in my life.
Psalm 37
23The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way.
24Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand.
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