If you know me you will know that Anne and I are supporters of Liverpool Football Club. On 4^th September we drove up to Anfield Stadium to watch a match. As you can imagine, parking is an issue. There is quite a lot of match day parking – official and unofficial (people open up an area of private land for the night and charge about £10) – about a mile ( 1.5 kms, ish) from the stadium, and after that the parking thins out considerably. I wanted to head for one particular car park just under a mile away, which I had entered into google maps and was quite prepared to accept the walk; Anne didn’t want to walk more than half a mile. That’s the background: this is where the story begins.

First, I agreed to look for somewhere nearer. We drove past one car park, then another. The satnav said we were ¾ mile from the stadium. Any time now, I thought, and watched carefully for handwritten “Match Day Parking” notices. Anne was asleep – she was very tired, hence the lack of desire for anything more than the minimal walk. Not a car park in sight. Half a mile; still nothing. Fans were streaming towards the stadium along the paths and pavements, but we must have been on a different road from our usual approach because all the match Day Parking that I was familiar with around Anfield seemed to have vaporized, and needless to say every roadside parking spot was occupied. Soon the stadium itself was in sight at the end of the road. I kept driving, Anne kept sleeping, we came to the “Road closed” signs that are all around the stadium on match nights, and Anfield reached up over the rooftops in front of me. “LORD!”  I said as I turned away from the road block, “Where’s our parking??”

Then there it was. On a side street just in front of me ending less 100 yards from the stadium concourse was one parking spot – probably the only one within a mile radius of Anfield. (I’m not exaggerating – you just don’t see them on match nights). I swung right and parked the car, and Anne woke up with the stadium not a mile away, but just a couple of hundred yards.

I’m not just writing this to demonstrate that God really does sometimes give parking spots to His children, but to show how much it illustrates some well-known scriptures. The first is 1 Cor 16:14 – “Let everything you do be done in love.” I like the security of knowing where I am going to park, I don’t like uncertainties mixed with deadlines (in this case, getting into the stadium before the beginning of the match and enjoying the pre-match atmosphere which is part of the fun of the trip.), and I was quite happy to pay the price of a one mile walk to gain that security. However Anne was very  tired and didn’t feel like walking, so I laid down my own preference for her sake, and trusted God  (point 2) to ‘supply my every need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus’ (Phil 4:19)

Point 3 is this: not only did God supply that need, but it was according to Eph 3:20 – more than I could ask or think: “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” I was thinking that I might find a parking space somewhere in the vicinity of the stadium if I just kept driving around, and I was hoping that it would be near enough to walk to before it closed after the match, as well as near enough not to miss too much of the pre-match build-up; but 2 minutes walk from the iconic entrance gate was not in my wildest dreams. And free as well: no £10.00 parking charge. Which is point 4: “you who have no money come, buy grain and eat.” (Isaiah 55:1)

I could go on and talk about faith in the context of thanking God for His provision before we can see it – “Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.” (Mark 11:24), and of our loving Father’s willingness to bless His children out of the bounty of His goodness: “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” (Matt 7:11), but I’d like to land on John 14: 2-3 “In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.”

Jesus has gone and prepared a place for us in Heaven: we have this and other precious promises that it is so. But I think we can see another truth in these verses as well. The word “mansions” here is the Greek monē, meaning “dwelling place;” the same word that Jesus uses later in the same conversation with his disciples when He says “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home (monē) with him.” (John 14: 23). God in Christ went to the cross so that He could prepare a place for us to be with Him where He is in Heaven, and He came to the church at Pentecost and comes again whenever we ask Him (Luke 11:13, Eph 5:18) so that we can also be where He is on Earth.

A friend of mine in the prophetic ministry tells a story of a meeting where he had been invited to speak, when he became aware that the anointing of the Holy Spirit was on the woman with a flag and not on himself at the podium. Instead of delivering his message he called people forward to stand under the flag. Visions, healings and deliverance followed. Scores of people had powerful encounters with God that evening.    Jesus only ever did what He saw the Father doing (John 5:10), and since He sends us just as He was sent (John 20:21: “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you“) we can only do what He is doing if we want our ministries to be fruitful. We need Him to receive us where He is if we want to do what He is doing.

The free parking place that He had prepared for us was just a couple of minutes’ walk from the Anfield gate, where the words (from the Broadway musical “carousel” and sung by millions of Liverpool fans all over the world) of the Liverpool anthem are written: “You’ll never walk alone.” When we obey His words, walking in love and trusting in His provision, He will always give us a parking spot in the place where He is working, however unlikely it seems and however removed it is from what we had planned, because we never walk alone.

(We won the match, incidentally!)