I received a Western Union telegram once — which was unusual even at the time — requesting that I consider a three-month deployment to Korea as a weather officer. I was a captain in the Air Force Reserves, and there was an interim need for a chief of weather plans for the Korean theater of operations.
My wife and I talked it through. The math was straightforward enough: deployments tend to be good for the savings account, and we were anticipating the cost of my master's degree. The Air Force needed an experienced weather officer in a critical short-term role. The arrangement seemed mutually beneficial and practically sensible.
God had other plans. Which, looking back, is a sentence I have written about more than one carefully reasoned decision in my life.
I arrived in Seoul not knowing the full shape of what the next twelve Sundays would hold. What I knew was that Yoido Full Gospel Church was there — at that time the largest church in the world — and that I intended to visit. Nothing prepared me for what I encountered when I stepped off the bus on that first Sunday morning.
The entire city transportation system had been rerouted to manage the flow of more than one hundred thousand people arriving for services. From the bus stop, it looked like pure chaos — clusters of people gathered in circles outside the buildings, praying aloud. Men and women with their hands pressed against the walls of the church, crying out to God with an intensity that I had never witnessed in person. When I was inside and removed the interpretation headset during the communal prayer time, there was a roaring sound — not individual voices, but something that rose together into a collective cry that filled the space completely.
You could not deny the presence of the Holy Spirit. It was not a feeling or a mood or an atmospheric effect of a large crowd. It was unmistakable. It was real. And it was the first of twelve Sundays I spent worshiping in churches throughout that city, none of which I had planned or arranged in advance.
Seven of those Sundays, God arranged for me to speak at local congregations. I did not seek those invitations. I did not present myself as available. They came through connections I had not cultivated toward that end, in sequences I could not have organized if I had tried.
This is the chaortic life in motion. The telegram was not a spiritual prompt — it was a practical arrangement with sensible human rationale behind it. The savings. The role. The timing. And underneath all of that, invisible until I was standing outside Yoido with the city's transportation routes redirected around a hundred thousand people pressing toward worship, was the order that God had placed inside what looked to me like a routine deployment decision.
The chaos was mine. The order was His. All I had to do was show up.
Actions
When was a time in your own life that what looked like chaos from the inside turned out, in retrospect, to be God's specific order? Write it down in enough detail to actually remember it.
Where are you currently in a situation that feels like disrupted plans — and what would it look like to ask not "how do I get back on track" but "what is God doing here that I am not yet seeing"?
Attitudes
How do you respond when circumstances redirect you from a carefully reasoned plan? Is your first instinct to recover control, or to become curious about the redirection?
What would it mean to hold your practical plans loosely enough that God can reroute them without you spending the whole deployment resenting the detour?
