Hi everybody welcome to this edition of Ignite. I want to talk to you about the very clear point that there are no coincidences, okay? And I mean we get our lives interrupted on a continual basis, is it seems like never, it never goes according to plan for me in particular. There’s always things that have interrupted my life. Why God now, you know? But when you get back and say, okay God what are you up to? It changes your perspective on those things. And it goes all the way back. There’s there’s a ton of Scriptures, the disciples, I mean, the things that happened to them, and they couldn’t understand why. Why did they happen to Jesus? They ran from Jesus, all that. I’m thinking of Paul, and you know he’s on his way to Rome and the and and the ship goes down, and they end up on Malta of all places. And he praised God through that all and quite frankly, the people of Malta probably would have never would have heard the good news for a long time later. Except that Paul was shipwrecked and left there. And he left a body of people there, serving the Lord and whatever happened from that, we’ll never know untill we get to heaven. But I mean, there’s all kinds of those kinds of experiences out there.
I mean, when you live in the fog, when you live in the favor of God, it means that everything in your life is working together for good and you would expect me to say Romans 8:28. It is my go to verse but it is so true! Everything in your life works together for good. When you live in the fog when you live for His purpose. It says when you love me and you live for my purpose to those who love me to those who live for my purpose, His purpose is to seek and save the lost. So when we lived to seek and save the loss and move everybody everyday closer to Jesus, there are no coincidences. It just doesn’t happen that way. A couple of early on ones, I’m going back now 50 years, okay? And it was when I didn’t know what I was doing. I talked my family into, into letting me go to retail but I didn’t know anything about retail. I didn’t know the faintest thing about retail, I knew how to buffer a car. I knew how to do that really well. But I knew nothing about retail. So I said, God, you just gonna have to send some people into my life. That can tell me how to do this. And He did. I was in you may remember the story I’ve told it before, but I was in a waiting room with a bunch of other traveling salesman waiting to see my buyer and I sat next to a guy by the name of Craig Benson. And, and we circle a nice conversation is very nice. He’s like 20 years my senior. And then he went to his buyer and I went to mine. That was in Dallas, Texas. Two weeks later, I go into the same type of waiting room at another customer’s location. And it is Seattle, Washington and I walk in and here’s the same guy. There’s Craig Benson! Hey, I know you. So we, we talk and we, we share analysis and I realized something, God’s up to something here and he said what you, what’s your dream? What do you, what do you, what are you working on? I said, that’s not what I’m here today for but it is my dream. I had the greatest car wax in the world and I want to go retail with it. I don’t know how to do it. And he proceeds to tell me that he could help me do that. He is a general partner in the largest advertising firm in the United States. I said why can’t help you. I mean, you can help me but I can’t, I can’t pay for it. I have no money. He said, well where do you live? He says uh, he says, he was really into where I was living we could ever connect us. I said I lived down in Orange County, and Irvine turns out we live about 15 minutes from each other. Okay, so there are no coincidences. I meet him in Dallas. At the same time, same place where in there. I meet him in Seattle and then we find out we live 15 minutes from each other. And he ends up spending volumes of time for no charge. He really given me like a master’s degree on marketing in to the big box stores to the to the mass market. It’s incredible. There was another guy that I’ve often told this story about: Al Atherton and I met him at a conference up in LA and same kind of thing happened. He made a powerful ad man and but he got intrigued with me and he wanted to help me and he started driving from LA down to my office once a week to talk to me and give me encouragement and tell me what I needed to do. He’s just amazing. Was it a coincidence that I met Al Atherton at a conference up in LA? I go back 50 years ago, but then it just keeps going.
You know, I often tell the story of I was at this hotel and I needed to get to dinner. My friend always wants to pay the bills. So I want to get there before him so I can pay the bill. I sat up in my room and I trying to get my my Uber app to work and it wouldn’t work. So I told Karen, we gotta get downstairs to get outside the hotel to get my Uber app to work. So she said, okay. So we, we rushed outside, it still doesn’t work. And so Karen says, you better get that taxi. I said great idea. So I started telling the guy with the taxis. Well, that taxi spoken for and I said, what do you mean, it’s spoken for? Well the lady behind you back by, right by the front door that’s her taxi. So I said, well, how long would it take to get another taxi? He’s what’s about five o’clock? Probably about 15 minutes or so. I just, the blood is draining out of my head. No, no, I can’t have this happen. About that time I hear sir? I listen, sir? I look around. It’s the lady by the front door of the hotel. She says, just take my taxi. I said, wait a minute. What do you mean take your taxi? She says well, my husband’s upstairs. I don’t know what he’s doing. I, he may be 10 minutes. I don’t know. I’ll just take the next taxi. So I said, okay. So we jump in the taxi and that, and the taxi should begin and takes off with skidding rubber. And the guy is has profanity from his first, from his first words out of his mouth were the blankety-blank do you want to go? He was out of control. So we started asking questions, you know, what’s, what’s going on? We found out that his wife had just passed away from agonizing cancer, they couldn’t stop it. And his kids were just in rebellion and drive him out of his mind. He was, he was at his wit’s end, you know, and so whenever you’re in those kinds of situations, just say, God, you know, give me the word. And he quickly came in. And I said to him, you know, God says, come unto me all you, all you who are burdened heavy laden, and I will give you rest. And he yelled to that same intensity, his voice, boy, do I need rest! So from there to the rest Karen and I kept giving him scriptures, and towards the end of the trip he said, I need to get in church. I need God. That’s what I need. So we got out and I said, I tell you what, if you tell me where you live, and give me your, your cell number, I will find a church near you. We need to send somebody to a good church, not just any church. 90% of all churches are not even sharing their faith anymore. I’m talking about salvation, so be careful of that. Anyway, he said yes, of course. He wrote it all down. I said, Can we pray for you? He said, would you please? So here we are in the front of this restaurant, this wonderful restaurant. People, traffic, and people walking in and out and here Karen and I in the, in the wash of the floodlights of his taxi, praying together, right? And having this wonderful time. I’ll never forget that moment. You have these moments. I mean, you share your faith everyday. But then there’s these watershed moments, you just know, you made a difference in somebody’s life in a huge way, right? Well, think about coincidences, you know? God had to stop my my Uber app from working right. He, he had to keep the lady’s husband upstairs. He had to give her benevolent heart where she wasn’t going to just hold on to that taxi, but she said, just go ahead and use my taxi. Think of all that. And then he had to have that taxi driver right at that place at that time for Karen and I walk into that taxi. I mean, there are no coincidences. There’s not.
I, I’ll tell you one more, just real quick. And these are all in my book. If you get my book, Ignite Your Life, I tell lots of these stories and everyone’s amazing. We were flying to Manchester, New Hampshire for a car rally with our friends Rich and Sherry Klein. And we got held up in Chicago, how many times have you had that happen to you? By the time we got to Manchester, it, we were the last flight in and we’re the last baggage claim and all the bags came out and ours didn’t come out. Right? So it’s always it’s gonna come, sure finally you the last two bags, you know, they’re like it actually stopped and then it started up agin to send our two bags down. You know, God’s up to something. We walk out, we always have a car waiting for us at our late age stage of the game. At our age, we have a car waiting for us, you know, but it wasn’t waiting for us. It wasn’t there. There was no car for us. So I call back to my secretary and we find out, find out that they’ve been trying to find the driver. They don’t know where he is and now it’s one o’clock in the morning and they don’t know what to do. So they said they will keep looking. I said alright, so I looked around and there was two benches. I actually said to Karen wow at least there’s two benches here. It’s a warm evening we have and we laugh. Karen and I laugh when things go wrong. Because when things go wrong, God is up to something. Every single time instead of saying, well, thanks a lot God this all we need. You say God, what are you up to? You’re up to something. And we talk then about how we say just about every time there must be somebody God wants us to talk to tonight. So he’s interrupted our lives. About that time they announced that the airport is now closed. We look back the lights are all off. I went to the door it was locked. And really, it was only then we realized there was nobody in the airport. I mean, it was it was gone. There wasn’t one taxi, there wasn’t one person. It was totally deserted. I had to take a picture of it. It’s a great scene. So we just laughed and said, oh, well, you know, what do you have to God? Well Kathy my secretary found a guy who had taken a ride up to Boston and was deadheading back. And somehow she got a hold of him. And he came by picked us up and we’re driving off and he had gotten the story from my secretary. So he knew what was going on. He just was amazed all the things that could have gone wrong to get us to that place. And so finally he said, so what was going through your mind? You really want to know? Yeah! Well, it went through our mind that God must have somebody he wants us to talk to about him. He says, that’s amazing. I said, what? He said, oh, my life is a wreck. I just everything, everything, everything that could go wrong is going wrong. To the point where I said, I need God, I need to get back to God, I need to talk to somebody about God. And here you are. And so for the next hour, we’re an hour away from our hotel, we talked nonstop with him and just had a wonderful time. I mean, he was so so excited. I had to get out of the car and so we gathered together and we prayed this wonderful prayer together. Emotional prayer together, it was three o’clock in the morning, by the time we we got into bed that night, and we couldn’t go to sleep. We couldn’t do that. We had so much fun that day, that night. We, without God we would say ah, man, we were telling it until now. That was a Nightmare Night you cannot believe all things that went wrong. Sometimes just things go wrong. No because sometimes God’s in the middle of your life doing something to give you the joy of your life. People say to me all the time. Why do you and Karen always have joy? You’re always so joyful? Why is that? You want to know why? This is why because we’re always coming off one these experiences and we know another one is coming up but that fills your life with joy. This is why. See you next time.
