No Coincidence

 

 

 

 

Esteban Castro, CBN.com

 

It was 2:00 in the afternoon. I had an hour until the Vive+ television program began, and I had the privilege of answering ministry calls from people who wanted to know more about Jesus. I tried to start the car and I tried again with the same result. I called for a tow truck. It was now 3:00 and the program had already started. I was worried that I wouldn’t be there to answer the calls together with the rest of my colleagues from the Mexico office.

Finally, the truck arrived. The driver said that I had to ride with him in the cab. At that moment, I noticed that he had a statuette of “Santa Muerte”—the cult symbol of death on the control panel of the vehicle. In Mexico, this type of cultic practice is, sadly, common.

At that moment, I understood that God had a purpose for this incident. I prayed for wisdom to present His Word and a conversation began. At first, it was very tense as I asked him if he was a follower of the cult of death. He said yes. I wanted to know how he was doing.

He told me his story, about his job a few years back, how he got trapped in the drugs he used, how he lost his wife and two daughters because of his addiction, and that he had found the statue while he was digging up rubbish in the cellar where an uncle allowed him to sleep. He was grateful that he had overcome addiction and had his family back. I was silent for a long time and paid attention to every detail. I felt a genuine interest in the man. His eyes filled with light when he talked about his two daughters. It was something I could identify with. He attributed everything to the statue of Santa Muerte, but he also knew that the image had no more power than what he gave it.

“If you have faith in this bottle of water, good things will happen because you have faith in it,” he explained, very sure of himself. That afternoon, the traffic was particularly heavy for a Saturday. It gave us time to talk. Listening to him, I thought his reaction was very human. How many times have we missed the opportunity to see God or recognize Him because we are looking for our own explanations? We can miss the blessing by focusing on the reasoning that sounds appealing, but actually draws attention away from God and onto our own desires (see 1 Corinthians 10:1-18).

But this was not the time for reproaches or controversy. I prayed to God to give me love and the Word that He wanted to share with him. At that moment, the Lord brought Romans 10:17 to my mind, where it says

… faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ (NIV).

With that reminder, it was my turn to speak.

I explained that, in reality, God had been with him and had reached out to him at just the right time, by His grace. I told him that I was sure of that because the Bible explains it clearly:

Our help is in the name of the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth (Psalm 124:8).

We cannot let anything rob God of His glory. Later, I asked him about his relationship with his father and he told me that it was very bad.

“But to those who received him, to those who believe in his name, he gave the right to be children of God,” (John 1:12) was my response. I told him that God loved him in a way that was immeasurably greater than the love he had for his daughters and that He had given His only begotten Son for him, that Jesus’ blood was shed to pay for sin.

That day, he kindly declined my invitation to receive Jesus into his heart but promised to read the book of Luke that very afternoon. With a new battery, my car started. I asked God that the heart of that man would have a restart while reading His Word.

Later that day, reflecting on this experience, I realized something that I want to emphasize. There are two ways to live life; one is to see the hand of God in everything, and the other is to overlook it and attribute its blessings to other things such as circumstances, luck or chance. When we relinquish control of our lives to Jesus, we can expect Him to always have a purpose for every detail—even a car with a dead battery.