Praying for opportunities
Have you ever tried praying for storying opportunities? I see far more when I’m searching for them.
In 2000 I started a tradition of asking God for a ‘divine appointment’ for each holiday. This became known as my ‘holiday gift’ and was someone that He’d specifically prepared for the good news like the Ethopian eunuch in Acts 9. This year the opportunity was slow to arrive and I was looking hard for this person. The highlight of my NZ holiday was the five day hike on Caples/Routeburn with four others. We met a family of three (parents and adult daughter). It wasn’t until the fourth night that God arranged circumstances so that the cold forced people to huddle around the stove. The husband asked me what I did and was quite intrigued when he heard that I was a ‘storyteller.’ I told him that he and his family were welcome to come and listen to our nightly story as a group. We’d been doing six stories in the book of Daniel. In the end I suggested that we start again from Daniel 1 for the newcomers. Over about an hour we heard Daniel 1 to 4. I explained how we did discussion and enjoyed hearing them answer according to the ‘game’ rules where we say, “Everyone must answer in one to two sentences and no one can repeat answers.”
- What part of this story did you like? Why?
- What questions might someone have about this story?
- What can we learn about people in this story?
- What can we learn about God?
After the first four chapters I suggested that everyone prepare their meals and that we could continue after dinner if they wanted to hear more. During dinner preparation two of them came to me, “We can’t wait to hear the last two parts of this story.” After the stories the family split naturally into three and talked with my friends about such things as science versus the Bible, and the reliability of the Bible.
We had discovered that we were catching the same bus the next morning and so I said, “If we finish the walk early tomorrow and you want to hear another story we’d love to share one with you.”
I then asked one of my friends to revise her Genesis 3 story just in case. To our disappointment the bus driver was early but I told them that my friend had prepared a story and they had a wonderful discussion in the bus. Each of the three were impacted by the stories and one clearly said, “These stories demand a response.”
