Providential Relationships

This past Sunday in my message we talked about Providential Relationships and the people who God dropped into your life at just the right time.

Think about it for a moment: Outside of your family, who would that be in your life? Who has God used to help grow your faith?

There are a small handful of people that I would say had a disproportionate impact on my spiritual life. The first was my youth pastor, Carey Olson. When I was in high school, he would meet with a small group of us early Tuesday mornings before school. We’d get together at Denny’s and talk about the Bible and life. And he’d challenge us and encourage us in our walk with Jesus. And then he would live it out. I ended up at Bethel Seminary in large part because that’s where Pastor Carey went. He was a great example to me at a critical time in my life.

Another key person for me was a friend of Pastor Carey's, youth speaker Greg Speck. They had gone to Bethel College together and Carey invited to Greg to come and speak a couple of years in a row at a youth retreat. And Greg made a huge impact on my life. I got all of his message cassette tapes and I listened to them dozens (and dozens) of times as he shared practical truth from God’s Word. We corresponded through the years and are still friends today.

The third key person was one of my college professors, Dr. Gary Burge. I went to college to be a journalism major, but my college didn’t actually have journalism as a major, so I switched to English, because I thought that would be pretty close. It wasn’t. So I was kind of searching around for a direction when I took my first New Testament class under Dr. Burge. And he just made the Bible come alive in a way that I had never experienced before. But it wasn’t just his teaching, as a person, he kind of took me under his wing and kind of mentored me and modeled a Christ-centered life for me.

There are a lot more, certainly, but these three stand out.

What about you? Who did God drop into your life at just the right time? Have you told them?