It is an ordinary dorm room…

Nothing special happened there…

No paramedics arrived to save a life…

No one came to Christ in some dramatic moment…

It was simply the place my daughter lived for one short semester before she transferred to another school.

In the years after she left that room, if you had asked me or her whether anything special had happened there, we would have answered, “No”.

That university had been the wrong place for her…

She was happy to be at her new school.

As a family, we often said it was too bad she had to waste her first semester at the wrong university. In fact we thought going to the first university might have been outside of God’s plan for her.

We were wrong.

Years later…

We would understand that God had been present in the dorm room…

Working according to his own plan and his own timetable.

In her room, my daughter met a friend who lived in the suburbs of a large city 300 miles away.

I got  a job offer in that city and moved at the same time my daughter went to school.

Surprisingly, her friend lived only about 20 minutes from our new house, and so she and my daughter shared rides home on long weekends or vacations.

Several years passed as my daughter got an undergraduate degree, and two graduate degrees in her field.  She moved to the city where we lived and started her career.

One night her dorm room acquaintance, whom she had met by chance at the school we all thought she never should have attended, called and invited her out with a group of friends.

My daughter came home excited. She had met a really great guy.

Three years later they were married. All because she met a someone years before at a college she wished she hadn’t attended.

For all of these things to have happened

• My daughter had to go to the “wrong” school for one semester
• I had to get a job in a new city
• She had to meet someone who lived minutes away from our new home

Do I believe God’s Grace was the reason all of these things happened?

I do.

I would add the dorm room to the list of places where I would build an altar to the presence of God in my family’s everyday life…

And when future generations of my family ask, I will say that’s a place where God was gracious to us. That’s a place where He was present in our lives.

Where has God shown his grace to you?

Where are your “Places of Grace”?

Places that increase your faith?

Places that will forever mark the faithfulness of God in your life?

Share in a comment below….

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