It was only two minutes... - All The Good Seed Daily Devotionals for 2026

There is but a step between me and death.
1 Samuel 20:3.

It was only two minutes! Two minutes that prevented him from boarding the plane. Two minutes that decided between life and death.

The Boeing was to fly from Ethiopia to Kenya. There were 157 passengers on board. He wasn't admitted, although he had booked seat 2 L in the business class. He was too late, and the staff were unrelenting.

Antonis Mavropoulos, a Greek, was furious. He was even angrier when, three hours later, sitting in the next flight to Nairobi, security guards fetched him out and took him to the police. The official told him to stop protesting and rather thank God. Only then did Mavropoulos learn that the machine he had missed had crashed six minutes after taking off. None had survived. He was the only one on the passenger list still alive.

Perhaps it has not always been so conspicuous, but haven't you and I often experienced being preserved, as if life had been given back to us? Perhaps we did realise it in retrospect. In this case it was a matter of two minutes, in our case it might have been a hair's breadth, a single step.

God has granted you and me grace - time to seek Him, find Him and turn to Him. Time, too, to thank Him, for His merciful preservation, His goodness, faithfulness and help, without which we would have been lost. Even time to tell others what we have experienced.

"Oh, that men would give thanks to the LORD for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!" (Psalm 107:8).

Today's reading: 1 Chronicles 26:1-32 · 1 Timothy 3:1-7