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The Spirit At Work
Ron DeBoer
2/21/2010
Since our four daughters were young, we have been praying for their future spouses. We pray for each of our children by name and then ask the Holy Spirit to enter into the heart of that boy out there who will grow up and meet our child and enter into a relationship with her. As our children grew up and moved through high school, my wife and I watched as boys appeared and disappeared. And then our 18-year-old began dating a boy, and it quickly became apparent that he was more than a high school fling. One day she sat us down to tell us about him. He was a good guy, she said, the oldest in his family. He wanted to be a police officer. And then came the sentence that stopped us in our tracks. He was Muslim.
Was this the boy we had been praying about all these years? If so, how much do we trust that the Spirit has been at work in his heart, as we have prayed throughout our daughter’s life?
From the beginning, we have urged our daughter to consider the importance of her boyfriend’s spirituality, to think long and hard about whether she can continue this relationship, and if she does, what her plan is to introduce her boyfriend to Jesus.
We lay awake at night, wondering what God’s plan is for our daughter and her boyfriend. Does she have the strength and capacity to navigate her way through all the complexities of a first deep relationship and bring him to the Lord?
Several weeks after our daughter’s revelation, I was preparing for the sixth grade Sunday School class I teach. I wasn’t really concentrating, thinking instead about our daughter and semi-consciously praying for her when the Bible passage of that lesson leaped out at me. It was Acts 8:26-40.
As for Philip, an angel of the Lord said to him, “Go south down the desert road that runs from Jerusalem to Gaza.” So he started out, and he met the treasurer of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under the Kandake, the queen of Ethiopia. The eunuch had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and he was now returning. Seated in his carriage, he was reading aloud from the book of the prophet Isaiah.
The Holy Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and walk along beside the carriage.”
Philip ran over and heard the man reading from the prophet Isaiah. Philip asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?”
The man replied, “How can I, unless someone instructs me?” And he urged Philip to come up into the carriage and sit with him.
The passage of Scripture he had been reading was this:
“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter.
And as a lamb is silent before the shearers,
he did not open his mouth.
He was humiliated and received no justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.”
The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, was the prophet talking about himself or someone else?” So beginning with this same Scripture, Philip told him the Good News about Jesus. (NLT)
Was this passage God’s message to me that we and our daughter were being called to minister to her Muslim boyfriend?
As my wife and I continued to pray for wisdom and for the Spirit to do its work, we were surprised over and over again at how God spoke to us when we opened our hearts to his words. A few nights later, I awoke with a thought that I am sure God downloaded into me: Our daughter is going to bring her boyfriend to Jesus. And his family. The thought was in someone else’s voice, and the voice used our daughter’s name. The next morning, my wife and I were astounded to share the same thought we’d heard that night.
Weeks passed. We continued to urge our daughter to invite her boyfriend to visit us and to invite him to youth group and maybe even church. She was (and still is) nervous about bringing him home. She doesn’t want to scare him off. Nothing seemed to be happening in the time we wanted it to happen. We weren’t considering God’s time.
Driving to work not long ago, I pulled over to the shoulder and asked God to show me something again to assure me of his working in our daughter’s relationship. Immediately I felt at peace. I kept my eyes open for things people said and other signs that were the voice and thoughts of God. When I arrived at work, I sat at my desk and took a breath to start the day. Then, for some reason, I reached into the side pocket of my bag, and my hand found an appointment book that I had slid into the bag over the Christmas holidays. It had been handed out at church as a New Year’s present. Beside each day on the calendar was a Bible passage. I hadn’t used the appointment book at all, so I opened it to that day in late January to read the day’s Bible passage.
It was Acts 8:26-40 and the story of Philip and the eunuch. Of all the Bible passages and of all the days in the year, the two met up on the day I opened it to read for answers.
That’s a God thing, as one of my friends often says when something meaningful happens seemingly coincidentally.
We continue to pray that our daughter will be Phillip to her boyfriend as she leads him to Jesus. Last week she invited him to her youth group social. Because we are sinful and limited in our patience and wisdom, we continue to worry. But we lay our daughter and her relationship with her boyfriend at the feet of Jesus and let his Spirit work in both of them.
Please pray for them and for all our sons and daughters who need wisdom in their relationships.
Ron DeBoer is vice-principal at Galt Collegiate Institute in Cambridge, Ontario, and author of Questions from the Pickle Jar: Teens and Sex (Faith Alive Publishers).
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