That phrase comes up over three million times on a Google search but how often do you hear it in daily conversation?

I hope it came up a little in conversations around Hither Green yesterday afternoon, as it was the key motto of the sermon I preached at HGBC in the morning. Life often doesn’t follow our plans and keep up with our timetables but experience and scripture remind us that God plays a long game. Even heinous mistakes can be fuel to the fire of our journey – burned away and not repeated but playing their part in rounding us, shaping us and moving us forward. The speaking went well: I had a message to deliver that I could root in my own experience and tie into some of the things I had done when attending that church and it flowed fluidly from the long time I’ve been mulling it and the relatively short time I took to write down some outline notes.

What I didn’t expect was to hear it over the lunch table from the lips of a friend we visited further down the road. It could be a coincidence of course but I’ll take that as a confirmation that my arrow didn’t fly too far off target! Nothing is wasted indeed.