John T. Willis

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

God's Amazing Ways

A few days ago, my wife Evelyn and I were flying from Salvador, Brazil to Porto Alegre, Brazil. We were scheduled to fly to Rio de Janeiro, and change planes there to go to Porto Alegre. Our flight left Salvador three hours late, making it impossible to make the connecting flight in Rio de Janeiro. Having flown many overseas flights to and in many countries around the world, we began talking about how God was going to get us to Porto Alegre. We imagined these scenarios:
1. We will get to Rio three hours late, and there will be a late flight to Porto Alegre which we can catch.
2. We will have to spend the night in Rio and wait "standby" to Porto Alegre in the Rio airport the following day.
3. We will get to Rio three hours late, and find out that the flight from Rio to Porto Alegre was delayed three hours, so we could still make the plane going to Porto Alegre.
All these [and perhaps other] scenarios are very reasonable from a human point of view.

Here is what actually happened. We landed at the Rio airport and were taxiing to the terminal. A voice came over the loud speaker, saying that those passengers who were going to Porto Alegre should stay on this plane, because it was the plane that would go to Porto Alegre. Why didn't we think of that? This is just one other experience which reassures us that God is at work in his world, and keeps taking care of us when often we are unaware that anything "unusual" is happening.

John Willis