Your Crowd Holds Divine Appointments

I call them divine appointments, but that’s just my term for it. These are the seemingly random intercepts that God arranges in the crowd. I believe God uses crowds as a place he can cross the paths of two people who may not ever otherwise meet. He can do it for any kind of purpose, so crowds can be ripe with interactions led by his Spirit. I have walked into many crowded rooms and quietly said to God, “Show me what you’re doing here. Who do you want me to talk to?” because I believe he may even send me into some situations to be a divine appointment for another person. I used to stand in the huge atrium on the second level of our church, looking down as people poured in on a Sunday morning, and ask God to point out someone I should go meet in the crowd. I met a young mom this way when I heard the Spirit “whisper” a thought to me: Don’t walk away without getting her phone number. It’s twelve years later and she’s now part of my core.

Mary and Joseph took Jesus into a big crowd at the temple after he was born, and God led them straight to a couple strangers who almost seemed to be expecting them. Mary and Joseph were there to have Jesus dedicated after his birth at the standard time, according to the Jewish law for the consecration of firstborn sons, but God used it as a moment to confirm his Son’s identity and prophesy about his life. He had arranged for two people to be there. Jesus’s parents experienced two divine appointments waiting for them in the crowd, and Luke records that they “marveled” at what took place there when they encountered Simeon and Anna.

The first was Simeon: “Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God” (Luke 2:25–28, emphasis added).

The second divine appointment for Mary and Joseph was with Anna: “There was also a prophet, Anna, the daughter of Penuel, of the tribe of Asher. She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying. Coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2:36–38, emphasis added).

The Spirit of God can move people into crowds wherever we are at any moment. God set me up to intersect someone in a crowd in August 2003. If you don’t live in the Northeastern United States or Ontario, you might not remember a massive regional blackout that happened that month. It was the worst regional power blackout in the history of either the United States or Canada, and a lot of people outside the region never even paid attention. I sure did because my plane landed in New York City thirty minutes after the power went out. No one knew the scale of what had just happened. Technically I landed at Newark airport, which is just across from Manhattan in New Jersey. So I waited eight hours in a cab line (no Ubers back then!) only to find out that all the bridges and tunnels into the city were closed as a precaution in the chaos that was ensuing. The city was where my hotel room was ready for me. It’s also where my brother’s apartment was. My phone didn’t work because all the networks were down. People began to grasp the scale of the blackout just as it got dark and panic set in.

I made it to a nearby hotel where, because the keys weren’t working, the security systems were down. They couldn’t check in any new guests and were verifying identities, escorting guests one by one to their rooms, and letting them in with one master key. In protection for their current guests, they announced at eleven o’clock that anyone without a room key was going to be tossed off the property at midnight. I went to the bar, ordered a drink, and cried. And prayed. I, a young woman in my twenties, was alone in the city, about to be put out on the streets where people were looting and everything was in pitch darkness. I begged a security guard to let me stay. He told me he’d do his best to keep an eye on me during his rounds if I stayed near the property entrance. I was terrified, but I told myself it was better than nothing.

At 11:55 p.m. I got a tap on the shoulder. A man from a group of Wells Fargo employees sitting nearby was holding out a room key.

I just stared at it. I thought for a moment he was going to ask me if I wanted to share his room. He must have sensed my hesitation because he said, “Don’t you need a room? You can have this one. It was my coworker’s, and she found a rental car to drive home.” I felt saved by God himself! This was a surreal, eleventh-hour rescue. Looking back, it was definitely a divine appointment. I just happened to pick the table right next to the one person there with an extra key, and he offered it to me with literally five minutes to spare.

The next day I woke up and realized I was in the Wells Fargo employees’ block of rooms. They had their doors propped open and were trying to figure out how to get home. News had spread about the blackout, and no phones were working, no airports in the area were operational, and there were no rental cars left anywhere. But they’d somehow found themselves an expensive car service to get to Baltimore. They’d somehow gotten one cell phone to work briefly and the one call that magically got through was to their travel agents while I was standing there talking with them.

They said, “Hey, do you want us to get you a ticket home?” I stared at them blankly. “Where’s home?” they asked. “Let us buy you a ticket.” And the next thing I knew I was squashed between five Wells Fargo guys on a long drive to Baltimore with a plane ticket home to Cincinnati. I didn’t pay a cent. Someone from the crowd saved me not once but twice, by the grace of God. I knew this was God’s utterly miraculous provision through a divine appointment with these men in the crowd who kept me safe and got me home. I never saw them again. God can do amazing things with people buried in the crowd.

You are never alone.

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Alli Patterson. Blueprint for Belonging: The 5 Relationships Jesus Needed and Why You Need Them Too. Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group. ©2025. Used by permission.