When God Moves You Series

Nehemiah 2 WHEN GOD MOVES YOU

Please be turning in your Bibles to Nehemiah 2, Nehemiah 2 and verse 1, and as you’re turning I want to tell you that sometimes God just isn’t fair.

For the past 2 weeks I have been helping a friend move some dumpsters around different job sites and such. Well, this week I was moving some trailers around over at Spruce Creek, at the community where there is an airport and people have hangers attached to their houses in addition to garages.

The job I was on was a tile roof. When folks are replacing a tile roof, you have to have a driver on hand with extra trailers, because the tile weighs so much. The roofers fill the trailer 1/2 to 2/3s full and then you replace it with an empty trailer while you take the full trailer to the dump. Hopefully, you get back with the trailer you just emptied, before the roofers overfill the one you just left, cause those folks don’t want to stop for anything.

So, you have a couple of trailers there on the job site. It’s inconvenient for the people who live there, but it’s inevitable.

Anyway, the roofers were taking a break the other day, so I left a trailer in the driveway, and one in the road, to swap out shortly. And we’re not talking about Saxon, or Providence here. I’m talking about a side street in a gated community. I left the trailers and ran up the road for a minute. The next thing I knew I got a call from my friend, wanting to know where I was. Security in that subdivision was treating the trailer I had left behind like it was a bomb threat or something. They said I couldn’t leave a trailer like that, and they called the police.

So, I headed back to the job site. Parked my truck in front of the trailer and just sat there. In the mean time, security had been there, and they put 3 cones around this 8’ tall, 7’ wide red trailer, I guess so people could see it. BTW, the police never came because they knew these folks were just being silly.

So, I sat there for the next 30 minutes, just waiting for the roofers to finish their siesta, so I could switch trailers.

While I’m waiting, a couple comes out of the house, next to where I’m sitting, I see them look my way and then I hear the wife tell her husband, “It’s still there.” In other words, these are the folks who called security and the police on me.

Now, these folks also have a tile roof, and it has 2 tarps over it, so it’s leaking. So, soon they are going to need a new roof. I wanted to holler, “Hey Karen, where are they going to put their trailers when they come and work on your roof.” But I didn’t. Last week I heard some preacher say, “Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it needs to be said.”

I hate it when the Lord makes me practice what I preach.

By now I hope you have found the second chapter of Nehemiah.

- Read Nehemiah 2:1-20

1. God can move you without abandoning you.

In this chapter there is a major transition. Nehemiah moves from having the king’s ear, from being a confidant of the king and enjoying life in the palace, to being a builder; something he has no training for, or experience at.

In this case he knew the change was coming, but that is not always the case. Sometimes these transitions and changes come unexpectedly, but that doesn’t mean God isn’t in it, and that He’s not working.

One of my brothers is an investigator for the army. He was a supervisor in the DC area. Well, he had one of the people he was supposed to supervise, who was unqualified for his job. In typical government fashion, the government protected this guy’s job and position even though my brother repeatedly warned his superiors that the guy wasn’t pulling his weight, and that he was unstable. They ignored his complaints for more than 18 months.

Finally, it reached the point where the guy knew he was about to lose his job, so what did he do? He came to work with the rifle to shoot my brother. As the Lord would have it, my brother was away at training that day, so the guy was unable to do what he had planned. A friend of his at work hid the gun and covered it up.

My brother’s superiors covered up the whole thing, because they had ignored my brother’s repeated warnings and didn’t want this to go into their files.

The man was fired, but he was in the community and knew where my brother lived.