God’s favor means..I don’t even have to try
As I was praying last night and reflecting over my day, I was thanking God for the huge things He was doing in our lives. Huge and unusual!! I was going over a conversation I was having with my sister about how unusually nice people were being to us. It is the kind of niceness that is so over the top that it catches your attention..because it doesn’t make sense. In the midst of the conversation, I caught myself saying to her, “Either people are being unusually nice to us or this is God’s favor!” In that instant, I realized that in this new season we had been confusing God’s favor for people being overly nice.
That led me to go back to when I started seeing a noticeable difference between last season and the new season. Somewhere around the end of February to the beginning of March, God drew a line in the sand to differentiate between the two seasons. He made it abundantly obvious!! Last season, it didn’t matter what I said or did..there was a lot of struggle and effort; you couldn’t change people’s minds; they seemed hard-nose for no reason. With this season, we didn’t even have to try. It was like people were falling over themselves to help us whether we realized we needed the help or not.
Let me give you an example….we went to Target yesterday to purchase some items, as we were strolling through the aisles, a Target employee approached us and said he noticed the items we had in the cart and he could show us how to get discounts off of our purchases. We both looked at him like, I wonder what scam you are coming with? He then began to tell us about an app on our phone that would scan the items we wanted to purchase to let us know if they were on sale and to receive discounts off of them. He took about ten minutes to try and help us set up the app (in this time, other customers would approach him for help, and we would have to make him stop helping us to help others..he would then quickly help them and pick up right where he left off with us). The app never opened. No matter what we tried, it never opened. He then looked at us and said, “Don’t worry about it!! When you go to the cashier, let her know that you couldn’t access the app and I said to give you 15% off of your items!”
Needless to say, we were taken aback. He had nothing to gain from giving us the discount. It wasn’t like he was trying to sell us something! We already had the items in our cart. That led to the conversation about how kind and nice he was to us and that we had been experiencing that a lot lately. “That people seemed sooooo nice lately!” Ding ding ding..lightbulb went off during the conversation…it wasn’t necessarily that people were being nice lately, but we were experiencing a new level of God’s favor that didn’t require anything from us. It is the kind of favor that is not usual; the kind of favor that causes others, no matter who they are, to want to be extra kind, extra nice to you; it is the kind of favor that leaves you dumbfounded; the kind of favor where you don’t even have to try.
So the next time you experience kindness in a way that doesn’t make sense, don’t mistake it for people being overly nice…recognize it for what it is..God’s inconceivable, astounding favor!!
