When God Uses Our Lost Donkeys
“As for your donkeys that were lost three days ago, do not set your mind on them, for they have been found.” 1 Samuel 9:20 (ESV)
This week let’s dive into the Old Testament, a story of disappointment turned into destiny fulfilled.
The story begins with a young boy searching for lost animals. You see, Saul wasn’t looking for a kingdom. He was looking for donkeys.
That’s actually how 1 Samuel 9 starts. His father Kish’s donkeys wandered off, and Saul spent three days trudging through the hill country of Ephraim, through Shalishah, through Shaalim, through Benjamin, finding nothing. Three days of frustration, wrong turns, and sore feet. By verse 5 he’s so tired and discouraged he turns to his servant and says, essentially, “Come, let us go back, lest my father cease to care about the donkeys and become anxious about us.”
It’s such a relatable moment, one familiar to many of us.
The search isn’t working.
Nothing’s going the way it should.
Maybe it’s time to cut our losses and quit.
But then the servant mentions a man of God in the nearby city. Someone who might be able to point them in the right direction.
So they go. And the rest, literally, is history.
When Saul walked into the city of Zuph that day, God had already told Samuel he was coming. The night before, God had said, “Tomorrow about this time I will send to you a man from the land of Benjamin, and you shall anoint him to be princeover my people Israel. He shall save my people from the hand of the Philistines. For I have seen my people, because their cry has come to me.” (1 Samuel 9:16).
Samuel had thirty men waiting at a feast, with a portion of meat set aside for a guest who didn’t yet know he was invited.
Saul came looking for donkeys. God was setting up a coronation.
A Lesson for Us
Here’s how that might help us see our own inconveniences.
Think about your version of the missing donkeys. Maybe it’s the job that fell through and forced you to take a different position, which turns out to be exactly where you’re supposed to be. Maybe it’s the flight you missed, the traffic jam that made you late, the friendship that ended and opened your eyes to something better. Maybe it’s a health crisis that redirected your life in a way you wouldn’t have chosen in a million years but can now barely imagine living without.
We hate those moments. We’re supposed to. They’re annoying and disorienting and they mess with our plans. But Proverbs 16:9 is blunt about our plans: “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.”
We have more in common with Saul than we might think. We’re both out there tracking down our donkeys, and God is already waiting at the destination.
What’s remarkable about Saul’s story isn’t that God intervened. It’s how God intervened.
Not through a vision or a burning bush or an angelic visitation. Through a mundane agricultural problem. Through an animal that wandered off. Through three days of getting nowhere, which put Saul in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
When Detours Are the Destination
Jacob’s son Joseph understood this in hindsight. Sold by his brothers into slavery, falsely accused, thrown in prison, forgotten by the cupbearer for two full years, he could have counted up a long list of unfair detours. But looking back at his brothers in Genesis 50:20, he said it plainly: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many peopleshould be kept alive, as they are today.”
The inconvenience was the route. The setback was the setup.
It’s easy to read that in a Bible story. It’s harder to believe it when we’re on day three of not finding our donkeys.
But that’s exactly where faith lives. Not in the moments when everything is going smoothly and the path is obvious. It lives in the detour, in the disruption, in the mundane frustration that makes you want to turn around and go home.
Don’t turn around yet.
The servant spoke up in 1 Samuel 9:6 and said there was a man of God in the city. That small nudge changed everything. Pay attention to those nudges. A conversation that comes out of nowhere. A door that closes and another one sitting there, slightly open. A voice, maybe a friend’s, maybe a quiet one inside, saying, “Before you give up, have you tried this?”
God doesn’t waste mileage. The hill country of Ephraim, Shalishah, Shaalim, all that ground Saul covered coming up empty, it wasn’t wasted. It was positioning. And when Samuel looked up and saw him walking into that city, God said something beautiful: “Here is the man of whom I spoke to you!” (1 Samuel 9:17).
God sees us in our detours. He’s already said, “Here is the man. Here is the woman.” The donkeys are already found. The feast is already set.
We just haven’t gotten to the city yet. Keep walking.
May God continuously lead your path