Today's passage is Matthew21:1-11.
Jesus sends two disciples to get a donkey and her colt in a village just outside of Jerusalem. As he rides them into the city, people put their cloaks and palm branches on the road before him, shouting Hosanna. When he answered the city, everyone wanted to know who he was and the crowd said he was Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth.
What must the disciples have thought when Jesus told them to go to a village and get a donkey and her colt they'd never seen before?
And when they found the animals and the owner let the disciples simply take them, what did they think?
Did the owner tell them that he had a dream about the event or that an angel visited him?
What mystery was it for them?
How do things happen?
How does God clear a path for me to walk?
Although God knows where I'm going, I don't know until I get there.
Once I recognize that I'm somewhere, then I look back and I see the route that got me there.
I see God's hand.
On the day Jesus rode in humble triumph into Jerusalem, no one recognized who he was or why he was there.
It's after the fact, after the cross, that Matthew understands and quotes Zechariah who prophesied the way Jesus would go into Jerusalem.
My marriage to Jin Kyeong is a rich blessing I don't deserve after the way I behaved in my first marriage and the sinful encounters I had with women.
I didn't look for her. In fact, I wasn't looking for any wife at the time I met her.
I had given up the hope of ever being married again.
I met my wife at a dance studio where I'd enrolled for some ballroom dance lessons before I went to India to teach at an international school.
She was one of the instructors, the only one who knew English.
I did not consider her wife material. But God did.
Just before I was to leave for India, I heard God's voice telling me to "Love that woman."
I recognized his voice because it was the same one that called me to faith 25 years earlier.
I don't expect to hear God like that again.
But he called me twice, both major turning points in my life.
Both times I resisted his command as I suspect the disciples did too when Jesus said to go get donkeys they'd never seen before.
Sometimes you just have to obey. I obeyed the call to love.
Later I recognized that, in response to the self-inflicted disasters of my life, I had largely stopped loving. My heart was shrinking.
I didn't want any more pain from shame and rejection.
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But I opened my heart enough to love this woman, this Jin Kyeong, got her email address and phone number, and left for India.
From India I courted her, using QT readings and Rick Warren's book as our intermediaries.
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Eleven months later we got married in the same week I attended my first Wooridle Church worship service, a Wednesday night one.
Then I went back to India to finish the teaching year.
A few months later I returned for good to Korea and became a Wooridle Church member.
That was my triumphant entry, not my marriage. It's taken me a while to recognize it.
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I had pursued and won my Jin Kyeong, which I thought was the point of God telling me to love her. But the point, as I came to see later, was to get me to Wooridle Church to recover my worship and to grow spiritually, to see my sins, to see myself objectively, confess and repent. And to learn and continue learning more profoundly just what love means.
My wife, my Jin Kyeong, was the donkey God sent me to find so that I could ride in humble triumph into the heavenly kingdom. "Hosanna in the highest!"
Lord, let me rest content in the circumstances you've placed me. Let me hear you truly in your word I read daily. Keep my heart open to love all the people you send into my short life.
