On this particular night, I was looking forward to getting to know more about Jeremy, a young man who had been coming to the center. When I saw him, I called out to him in an effort to start a deeper conversation. His head turned at the sound of my voice, and when our eyes met, I could see he was drunk. He staggered over to me and stood there for a moment, swaying a little. His color looked bad, and before I had the chance to say another word, he clutched his stomach and vomited all over the people in his path, me included.
My leadership skills flew into action, and instinctively I did what a leader does—I delegated. As I steadied Jeremy and led him toward a chair, I turned to one of my team members and said, “Go get some toilet paper and clean this mess up.”
A moment later, a few people came back, rolls of toilet paper in their hands, and I was about to issue my next instructions when suddenly I felt the Holy Spirit saying to me, “Christine, you wipe up the vomit.”
I have an extreme aversion to dealing with vomit, even to this day with my own children. However, my sense of God’s presence was so palpable that my heart started racing. I reached for a roll of toilet paper and began wiping the vomit off of Jeremy’s chin, jacket and shirt. As I did, a tenderness for him rose up inside of me, and I sensed the Holy Spirit impressing on my heart, “Christine, this is what you’re going to spend your life doing—wiping up the vomit of a lost and broken generation.”
As others backed away from the sight and smell of this mess, I got Jeremy cleaned up, then began wiping the floor. I knew this was a profound moment between God and me. I was on holy ground.
I admit it. Before that day, wiping up vomit wouldn’t have been on my short list of important work for God…but that was then. Today, I know better than to think we can rank the importance or status of the work God calls us to do. The Lord has taught me that when we run the race He has marked out for us, He chooses which batons He passes to us. He places us in the right lane and chooses which position we are to take within that lane. Every leg of the race is preparation for the legs to come. He knows the perfect timing to promote us from one baton to the next, one lane to the next, one position to the next; and such promotions often don’t look the way we expected them to look. That day with Jeremy, I was promoted from coordinating staff to wiping vomit, and in accepting that promotion, I’d moved closer to the heart of God.
As I was wiping vomit from the floor on my hands and knees, God was giving me my first lesson in a critically important principle: In order to thrive, we must learn to embrace our place. To embrace your place means that wherever you are in life, no matter what season you are in or what circumstances you face, you see yourself as an important member of God’s divine relay, and you accept and do God’s will today in light of His plan for all eternity.
