What's Stopping Me

Context

He's the treasurer for the queen of Ethiopia, basically the head of a kingdom's national budget. He has traveled hundreds of miles to Jerusalem to worship a God whose temple won't let him all the way in. Because he's a eunuch, the old law let him come close but never fully belong. He came all that way, and the door only opened so far.

Story

Now he's riding home, scroll open, reading Isaiah out loud to himself. Meanwhile an angel sends Philip to an empty desert road, no reason given, just go. Philip gets there, sees the chariot, and the Spirit tells him to run, not walk, and catch it.

He pulls up alongside, breathing hard, and asks if the man actually understands what he's reading. The eunuch isn't offended. He's honest, and he invites the sweaty stranger up into his chariot. The most powerful person on that road just made room for the guy covered in dust.

The verse he's stuck on is the lamb led to slaughter, silent, cut off. Philip starts right there and tells him about Jesus, the one who was shut out on purpose so the people left outside could finally come in. Then they round a bend and there's water, out here, in the middle of nowhere.

"Look, water. What's stopping me from being baptized right now?"

Nothing. Not his job, not his body, not the law that kept him on the porch his whole life. So they stop the chariot and wade down into a roadside puddle, and the eunuch comes up soaking wet and keeps driving home rejoicing.

What We Learn

We assume the big spiritual moments need the big setting, the right building, the right crowd, the right credentials. The eunuch did the whole pilgrimage to the holy city and still got turned away at the door.

Then God met him in the dirt, off the map, through somebody who wasn't even supposed to be there. The water nobody planned was sitting exactly where a man finally needed somewhere to belong.

Maybe the question to sit with is his own. What's actually stopping you.