The hand of the Lord can come upon us at any time or in any place, whenever we are open and ready to experience God’s transforming touch. The hand of the Lord doesn’t leave us where we are, but rather takes us where we need to be to carry out our purpose in life. Just look at some of our examples in scripture. The prophet Ezekiel in our lesson from the Hebrew scripture today tells us, “The hand of the Lord came upon me and he brought me our by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley.” Remember Abraham a few weeks ago called to leave his father’s house for an unknown destination, which came to be known by his descendants as the Promised Land. Moses was led up on a high mountain to commune with the Lord face to face, to receive the tablets of the law, and to see the Promised Land across the Jordan. Jesus, after his baptism in the Jordan, was driven into the wilderness for forty days to meet the Tempter as he contemplated his vocation. Lazarus in our gospel today was called from the tomb, raised to a new life. Paul fell to the ground when he experienced the hand of the Lord first stopping him cold on the road to Damascus and later lifting him to what he described as “the third heaven. . . into Paradise” (II Cor. 12:2-3). And John was exiled to the isle of Patmos to receive his apocalyptic revelation. No two experiences were the same, but all of them were touched in some special way by the hand of the Lord. Early this week, a friend loaned me a book entitled Fingerprints of God by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. As I was writing this meditation, I got to the end of the previous paragraph and couldn’t decide how to use those biblical examples to speak to us in today’s world. I took a break and opened the book,--after all the fingerprints of God must be on the hand of the Lord. As I read along, I was delighted to find example after example of people from all walks of life in the here and now relating their numinous experiences of the divine to the author. She summed up the point I wanted to make on p. 63 where she says, “When God breaks into your life, it is as if you are lifted up and plunked down in a new spiritual neighborhood. To your friends, you appear unaltered. . . . But you know, if no one else does, that your thoughts and ambitions and loves—your soul—have moved to a new zip code. You’re not in Kansas anymore.” That was true for Ezekiel, and Abraham, and Moses, and Jesus, and Lazarus, and Paul, and John, and countless others throughout history. And it can be true for you and me if we open our hearts to accept the hand of the Lord always reaching out to us in love.