HE SEES THE ONE! By Lori A Alicea

“Lord, if there’s anyone I need to meet today,
I trust you will arrange it.”

I pray these simple words every time I enter the grocery store, craft store, gym, or wherever I’m at during my day.

People masquerade their pain with fake smiles and one might never know which person is hurting, in need of an encouraging word, a timely prayer, a simple hug or smile; but God does.

“Shoulder to shoulder” among the crowds
He sees the one.

The sparrows fill the skies and yet
He sees the one which falls…
(Matthew 10)

While never losing sight over us, the one.

The conference I attended recently hosted over five thousand women who traveled from all corners of the world, gathering around a central theme that

Heaven Rules
In every situation of our lives;

A ministry I began listening to for encouragement during my lunch hour as a young, single mother raising two small children.

In the midst of a vast multitude, I believed for divine appointments with the one.

“Lord, if there’s anyone I need to meet today,
I trust you will arrange it.”

An hour before each session that weekend, I volunteered to be a greeter among the crowds.

Believing my job description was smiling, welcoming and taking group pictures of others by the photo walls…

I was caught off guard when women began asking questions of all kinds, for which I had no answers…

Directions to sessions taking place all over the convention center…

Directions to restaurants and coffee houses located in the surrounding city…

Questions spoken in languages I didn’t understand…

It would have been more accurate if my GREETER button actually said,
“DON’T ASK”…

After I sent a woman looking for a Spanish speaking prayer room to the nursing mother’s room instead…

When all I could do was smile and aimlessly point a group of hungry women to the food courts outside the front doors…

When I walked an elderly woman already out of breath down the long corridors to her next session, only to find us both in front of a dead-end section of the convention center…

You laugh over the blunders.

While being encouraged and reminded by a friend over coffee,

“Sometimes our wrong ways lead us the right way to a divine appointment.”

I think she’s on to something.

I continued to pray for the one that weekend.

It was a scavenger hunt for a needle in a haystack among five thousand women; but God knew the one.

He was about to introduce the three of us and reveal how intimately He knows us as the one.

Seated beside two sisters during a breakout session, I introduced myself and inquired of their “highlight moment” thus far.

One sister turned to the other sister smiling and rejoicing over their time spent together after a year’s lapse since they last saw each other.

During the course of our short conversation, we realized the younger sister and I lived thirty minutes apart; with the churches we attended down the road from the other.

Only to discover the younger sister was a bus driver at the same school my husband’s brother Joe and sister ‘n law worked.

I asked if she knew them.

A moment of silence as the older sister looked into the eyes of her sibling;

A gesture I believed had deeper meaning than they conveyed.

The face of the younger sister turned my way as she quietly spoke,

“I sat in awe during Joe’s three hour funeral, one year ago last summer.”

How timely our meeting; on Joe’s birthday, now celebrating in heaven.

Only God knew why three women were destined to meet from the five thousand among us.

I shared my prayer with two siblings sitting next to me three hours from home, so they could sense the divine appointment God orchestrated for us, the one,

“Lord, if there’s anyone I need to meet today,
I trust you will arrange it.”

Yes, God does hear our prayers; written, spoken or hidden inside our hearts.

I left a convention with question marks in my journal regarding this divine appointment with two sisters.

While being satisfied with the “need to know basis” we have with God.

I left a convention re-playing over and over my highlight reel…

Among the crowds and multitudes,
God keeps an intimate watch over me,
The one.