Some people might say I’m lucky but personally, I don’t think there’s any “luck” involved. I believe I’m the recipient of the undeserved grace of God. There have been some miracles and blessings around here lately that simply can’t go unmentioned. Let me explain.
I’m currently reading Robert Morris’ book The God I Never Knew. We’re going through it in our Lifegroup with some friends from church and I’m really enjoying it. What I like about it is the way Pastor Morris describes the Holy Spirit as our friend, someone we can talk to throughout the day, whose sole purpose and desire is to be our helper. The fact that God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, wants to hang out with me 24-hours a day is, in and of itself, pretty much amazing. I’ve been challenged as I’ve read this book to think more about God’s presence in my life which encourages me to “chat” with Him a little more often.
On the Saturday before Palm Sunday I specifically asked the Holy Spirit to walk with me through the day, helping me to accomplish what needed to be accomplished in the next 14 hours. One of the things I wanted to get done was making a big batch of taco soup. My new mindset is “cook once, eat twice” and on this particular day I decided that a quadruple batch was in order. (Sometimes I’m a little overzealous.) All went well. I used my new-to-me roaster and finished the batch in short order.
Of course, once it was done the next order of business was packing it all up for the freezer. But time management has never been my strong suit and at this point in the day I needed to get dressed and out the door to help during the Saturday night services at church. I would either have to put the soup in containers and into the refrigerator or leave the roaster on for the next several hours to keep the soup at a high enough temperature to prevent us all from getting E.coli or some such thing. I decided to put it in the refrigerator. Eventually, it would all go into large Ziploc bags but there was no time for that so I gathered up all available Rubbermaid containers and started filling them up. (It turns out that a quadruple batch of taco soup is really quite a LOT of soup!)
(I know you’re waiting for the miracle part here but hang on, it’s coming. In the meantime please marvel at my accomplishment of the quadruple batch, okay?)
My Rubbermaid containers are the type that have “easy find lids” meaning the lids “lock” to the bottom of the container when stacked on the shelf and naturally when you have one full container on top of another they also “lock” together somewhat. The ones I was using each held eight cups of soup. They look like this when empty. Had I known there was miracle in the making I would have taken a picture of them full of soup.
Despite the fact that my time to get dressed for church was waning I decided that it would be prudent to carry the containers to the refrigerator one at a time. They were relatively heavy and though I could certainly lift two at a time I just didn’t want to take any risks as I juggled to get them on the refrigerator shelf. So, I grabbed the top container, carried it three feet across the kitchen, and just as I opened the refrigerator door I realized that the bottom container had come along for the ride!
Remember how that morning I’d asked the Holy Spirit to help me accomplish what needed to get done that day? Let me tell you, I have absolutely no doubt that His hand was under that bottom container preventing it from falling to the floor. There’s no reasonable way to assume anything other than that. The sheer weight of eight cups of soup should have pulled the two containers apart the instant I picked the top one up. And let me tell you, there would have been tears, wailing, and gnashing of teeth had it fallen. It may seem like a small little thing to you but to me it was a miracle of epic proportions.
As for the blessing I mentioned, it came in the form of an Easter centerpiece. I had been scanning Pinterest and found this Easter Garden depicting the empty tomb. Our whole family was going to be here for Easter and I thought it would be fun to incorporate the real meaning of the celebration into the weekend. A friend from church posted a picture of the Easter garden that her four-year-old son had made and I loved it! I asked her if I could hire him to make one for me because by this point it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get it done. Over the years I’ve discovered that if you don’t ask the answer is always no, so, as I mentioned, I asked. Sure enough, when I saw my friend at Bible study on Wednesday she was carrying a sweet little Resurrection centerpiece for me and wouldn’t let me pay her son at all (though he did get a big hug.)
The grass popped up just in time for Easter and now it’s growing so fast you can practically watch it get longer.
Some days I’m just overwhelmed by the many seemingly little ways God shows me His love through sweet friends and unlikely miracles. There isn’t any luck involved at all. I am abundantly blessed! And the cool thing is, He wants to do the same for you.