Count Your Blessings, page 23
I slowly pulled out the blue folder and arranged each bundle neatly on the floor.
There was a ton of mind-numbing paperwork to sort through, and I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it. I took a deep breath, said a quick prayer and realized that while my position had been eliminated, I wasn’t. I had two degrees and was an adjunct professor at Columbia College. My ultimate goal was to make the transition from newspapers to academia. I just didn’t know my path would shift so abruptly.
A simple e-mail to my supervisor at the college turned into a blessing in the storm on that dark Friday. I wrote not asking for a job, but to just inform her of my situation. She gave me more classes to teach. I guess it’s true that when God closes a door, he opens a window. At 10:15 Friday morning, “my position was eliminated.” By 5:30 Friday evening, my other position had expanded.
On Saturday morning, I wrote about my experiences for a journalism blog. On Sunday, I was contacted by Microsoft regarding an editing position that was opening at MSN.com. I flew to Redmond on faith, and I got the job. God was putting me back on track to making my goal a reality. I cried again. This time not because I was broken, but because I was made anew.
~Emeri B. O’Brien
Bus Stop Blessing
A bus is a vehicle that runs twice as fast
when you are after it as when you are in it.
~Author Unknown
She ran for the bus with all of the strength and determination of an Olympic sprinter, but the bus pulled away from the curb without her—the driver not seeing her or just not caring. She collapsed on the bus bench in a heap of failure, disbelief and sobs.
I could have just kept on driving. It was the first day of my vacation and I was off to wander the local mall, and, besides, it wasn’t my problem, I didn’t know her. Another bus would be along soon. But there was just something about her. There was an intensity in her need that I could not ignore so I stopped my car and went up to her.
I sat down on the bench next to her and gently mentioned that another bus would be along in half an hour or so. I introduced myself and asked, “What’s your name?”
“My name is Sarah. I’m sorry to make such of a scene but I need to get to the hospital to be with my sick baby,” she responded through lessening sobs.
Sarah explained to me that she was a struggling single mother and her one-year-old son was in the hospital. She had gone home late the night before to get some sleep and when she started back to the hospital in the morning, her car battery was dead. I could tell from Sarah’s face that she was exhausted and that she felt overwhelmed.
“What’s wrong with your son?” I gently prodded.
“My baby has pneumonia and he has been very sick,” Sarah replied. “I don’t want him to be alone and afraid, I need to get back to him.”
My heart melted and my plans for the day took a detour. “Please,” I said, “let me give you a ride to the hospital.” Seeing a little hesitation in her eyes, I continued, “Please, it would be my pleasure.” Sarah’s face softened and I saw the first hint of a smile as she nodded her head yes, and we began walking toward my car.
On the drive to the hospital I learned that Sarah’s boyfriend had left her when he found out that she was pregnant and that she did not have any other family in the area. She has been struggling to work and raise her baby in a loving home. Though rough at times, things were going fairly well until little Daniel got sick. Daniel’s illness set Sarah back financially and emotionally
As I listened to Sarah’s story I decided to do everything I could to help her out. I dropped her off at the hospital, gave her my phone number and asked her to call me when she got home. I assured her that my brother would come over and help her with her car battery. Though reluctant, Sarah took my number and promised to call me.
I shared the day’s event with my Bible study group that night and asked the group to pray for Sarah and Daniel. The group did much more than that. One person had baby clothes left over she wanted to donate, another friend wanted to donate food and we even took up a collection of money to help Sarah out.
Sarah was very grateful and humbled by the help my group was able to give to her during the illness and recovery of her son. My brother went to help Sarah that night with her car battery and, not only did he get that battery to “spark” once again, sparks began flying between my brother and Sarah as well and now Sarah is my sister-in-law!
You never know what blessings God has waiting for you if you just take the time to stop and try to meet someone’s need. Sarah and Daniel are a precious addition to our family, and that would never have happened if Sarah had not missed her bus on that fateful day.
~LaVerne Otis
The Poop that Saved Christmas
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
~Marshall McLuhan
After I was laid off in mid-October, I faced the loathsome task of informing our seven-year-old. I tried to put it in as positive a light as I could—when the company merged with another company, they had twice as many people without having twice as much work to do. I stressed that I hadn’t done anything wrong and that it was nothing personal, but that they no longer had enough work for me, so I was basically finished with my job.
I said nothing about us having been treated more like an acquisition in spite of the fact that our company owned a controlling share of the new stock. I never cast aspersions on how our CEO cut us loose during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, nor did I point out that the company’s profits had been up by more than eighty percent, which negated any claim that the layoffs were a necessary cost-cutting maneuver.
I figured that was too much for a seven-year-old to swallow, which is why I put on a smile and simply told him I’d be looking for a new job, ignoring the urge to warn him that he might hear weeping sounds coming from Mommy and Daddy’s room.
Later came the talk of cutting our own expenses. We knew we’d be able to pay all of our bills through the end of the year, with little extra. Unfortunately, that time span included a period when tradition dictates that a family needs that little extra—Christmas. It’s one of the two most important holidays on the Christian liturgical calendar, as well as the season to essentially stick a vacuum cleaner hose in my wallet.
Nevertheless, we switched the vacuum cleaner off, and Christmas was suddenly about religion again. That’s also difficult for a seven-year-old to accept, but we figured it might be easier if he had advance notice. Hence came Part Two of The Talk, in which I explained that fortunately we’d bought a few small gifts for him and his brother before I’d lost my job, my money and my self-worth. This meant they’d get something for Christmas, but not nearly as much as in past years.
He took the news remarkably well; in fact, he even put a positive spin on it: “That’s okay, Dad—at least Santa Claus will still bring us the big gifts.”
After removing that dagger from my heart, I slunk to my computer to see if there was any possible excess in the budget I’d worked up. That Santa! He’s always upstaging me. The budget review indicated that even Santa had no chance of scoring with the big gifts.
There’s another aspect of the holidays that was affected by the layoff—travel. We needed to visit my parents, especially since my mom had a stroke in October. By the way, the news of Mom’s stroke was the third bad thing to happen in that October week that included my layoff and the death of a long-time pet.
So we knew we should go visit my parents in Virginia for Thanksgiving, but for us to get there would have cost more than we had between the cost of the gas and the hotel room we needed because I was allergic to their dog.
Not so with my in-laws. Which is how we found ourselves driving to their home the weekend before Thanksgiving. They live a little closer, so the gas cost is better, but the big difference is in being able to sleep in their house instead of a hotel.
Halfway there, I started feeling guilty about my own parents. But my thoughts were interrupted by a more urgent problem.
“I needa go poo-poo,” our toddler said.
“Okay, hold on. We need to find an exit. Will you sit on the potty at a gas station?”
“No.”
Sigh. We’ve been fifty percent successful with his potty training. He mostly wears “big boy unnerwear” and is able to keep them dry, but when it comes to Number Two, he’s been defiantly resistant. He warns us when it’s on its way, but refuses to sit on a potty. Instead, we have to take off his pants and underwear, put on a Pull-Up, and let him do his business as if he’s still in diapers.
So we pulled up behind the closest gas station/convenience store, and made ready for the deed. My wife was willing to do the hard part while I stood in the 20-degree night air, waiting for her to roll down the window and hand me a sealed freezer bag containing a soiled Pull-Up and wipes. My job was to throw it away while she changed him back into his big boy underwear.
When I finally took possession of the freezer bag, I had to walk around to the front of the store to find a trashcan for it. I had a hard time finding one, and briefly considered keeping the bag, so I could later mail it to my former CEO.
But I was resolute, and my search eventually took me inside the convenience store. I forgot all about the freezer bag once I noticed the glitzy display of lottery scratchers at the cash register. When I remembered my own lottery rules—including the increased likelihood of winning when a ticket is purchased in a nasty store in the middle of nowhere—I knew I had to buy one.
So I sidled up to the counter and asked for one of the scratch-ers, fishing in my pocket for money with one hand while I clutched the dirty freezer bag behind my back with the other. I glanced at the cashier’s nametag: “Virginia.” Ouch. Let the parent-related guilt continue.
We arrived at my in-laws in our usual flurry of chaos, the boys hyped on chocolate and excited about seeing their grandparents, me unloading our luggage as quickly as possible in order to minimize my risk of hypothermia. It wasn’t until the next morning that I remembered the scratcher. I found a penny, and began the anticipatory scratching ritual. I won $200 on the first space, and was ecstatic. I figured no more prizes would be revealed, but continued scratching. Nothing. Nothing. Then another $100—the holidays were suddenly looking up!
Next space, nothing. Then $100 again. Then a third $100. Was this really a $500 winner, or was I reading the numbers wrong? Next two spaces, nothing. Then another $200. Whoa. They don’t make $700 winners, do they? Nope—next space, another $200! Nothing, nothing, then $100 in the last space.
When I told my wife we’d just won $1,000, she asked, “How is that possible?” That’s when I had to admit I’d been frivolous and bought a lottery ticket. She asked where I’d bought the ticket, and that’s when it hit me—I had no idea. Neither one of us could remember the exit number, the town, the highway, the gas station, or the store name. It was supposed to have been nothing but a poop stop, but suddenly my son had presented us with the richest poop in town. Courtesy of a cashier named … Virginia.
“Sweetie, I think we should go to my parents’ place during the holidays, after all. We can stay in a hotel for one night. And maybe we should buy a couple more Christmas presents for the boys. And what the heck? Why not make a mortgage payment, while we’re at it?”
Most importantly, while I was full of holiday spirit, I finally threw away that freezer bag before I could find my ex-CEO’s address.
~Dan Bain
Exactly What We Needed
All God’s children need traveling shoes.
~Maya Angelou
I gasped and blinked back tears, hardly believing what I saw. For the second time in four months, the sight ahead of me stopped me in my tracks.
First had been the sight of my husband walking down the sidewalk to meet me, briefcase in hand, in the middle of the day: a picture forever etched in my memory. It was the day the Gulf War began, and the day the life we’d known ended. A friend had come up to my husband at work that morning and told him to clear out his desk. Small comfort that my husband was one of the last laid off as his company downsized from 2,500 to just 500 employees. His job loss at this date meant hundreds of engineers had already filled any openings local companies had. We both shrugged that thought aside, certain that my husband’s abilities and God’s guidance would connect him with another job in a short time.
And that’s exactly what happened—almost—when four weeks later, another aerospace firm offered my husband a job on exactly the kind of project he’d been working on. We rejoiced because this company was closer to our church, and we envisioned a new house in a new neighborhood and our long Sunday commute whittled down to a few minutes.
That was Friday. On Monday, my husband was scheduled to settle on a salary and sign all the paperwork. The new boss called instead to say, “The government pushed the contract back six months. Could you wait six months to start work?” Six months for what might never materialize at all? Our elation evaporated, leaving a vacuum quickly filled with confusion and questions without answers, not the least of which was my wounded cry, “God, why? Why put something so perfect in our reach, and then take it away? Don’t you care about us?”
“Between unemployment and our savings, we can make it through the summer,” my husband quietly advised me, “but we’ll have to cut everything non-essential from our budget.” We gritted our teeth, retrenched our hearts, and set our minds to eliminating as many expenses as we could. That meant I sewed shorts for our rapidly growing teenage son. If it embarrassed him to wear homemade clothing, he graciously never said so. It also meant our entertainment now consisted of borrowing videos from the public library, rather than even going to the dollar movie theater.
We tried to make a game of finding free or inexpensive new options to replace our old activities, intentionally putting a positive spin on our circumstances and conversations for the sake of our two children. My husband and I were both concerned as we watched our savings dwindle week by week, but the last thing we wanted was to pass our anxiety along to the boys.
Weeks turned into months as my husband networked, searched, and mailed résumés, diligently looking for work, with not even one interview to show for all his perseverance. I substitute taught as often as I could, but that meant many days when my husband had to stay home with our four-year-old son—days he couldn’t devote to job-hunting.
Any vacation was out of the question, so when my sister called to ask if we’d like to go boating with them at the lake for the weekend, I joyfully and thankfully shot back, “Sure thing!” Excitedly I began checking off things we’d need: “Sleeping bags, check; fishing poles, check; bathing suits, check …” A sudden realization sank my anticipation like an anchor tossed overboard. Most lakes here in Arizona are formed by damming rivers and filling canyons with water. Our lakes don’t have sandy beaches; instead the shallows are covered with sharp rocks, so you have to wear shoes to go swimming. Our younger son only had two pair of shoes: one dress pair and one good pair of tennis shoes. We couldn’t afford for him to ruin either pair, but we also couldn’t afford to buy another pair of even cheap shoes for him.
The last thing I wanted to do was cancel the trip and sink our sons’ happiness at finally doing something resembling our old “normal” life, so I asked my husband, “Could we stop by the thrift store on our way to the lake on Saturday?” I had exactly one dollar to spend, but I felt cautiously optimistic that I could find an old pair of children’s tennis shoes that might come close to fitting our son, so we piled our gear into the car that Saturday morning, relishing the eager “on our way” chatter from the back seat.
At the thrift store I leaped out of the car, praying, and dashed into the shop. That’s when I stopped short, gasping and blinking at what sat on a display rack directly in front of me. Almost afraid to look, I turned over the brand new pair of blue “water socks,” still sporting their original price tag, to look for a size. They were exactly the size our son wore, and they were exactly one dollar.
Many people would consider this a minor coincidence. To me, it was a major miracle. As we drove on, one elated four-year-old in the back seat happily trying on his glorious new shoes, I pondered all the “coincidences” that had to come together to create this small piece of providence:
• Someone had to buy the shoes in exactly our son’s size.
• Those shoes had to be unsuitable for some reason.
• The purchaser had to choose to donate rather than return the shoes to the store.
• The purchaser had to donate the shoes to that particular organization.
• The shoes had to make their way to that organization’s particular small thrift store in our neighborhood.
• They had to come in at exactly the time we needed to find a pair of shoes.
• They had to be marked for exactly what I could afford to spend.
• No one else could have spotted and bought them before me.
• I had to decide to stop at that particular thrift store, on just the right day, at exactly the right time.
At least nine coincidences had to converge to create this “ordinary” yet exactly perfect provision for us. What we found was more than just a pair of shoes! Though the shoes were exactly what—and even better than—we needed, what we needed most of all was hope: tangible, clear evidence to me that “someone” knew and cared about our needs. My wounded faith was healed at that moment, my heart dared to hope again, and I knew somehow our family would be okay.
It was two more months until my husband found a job, the week his unemployment benefits ran out. In yet another “ordinary” miracle, he applied for an assembly line position, but was hired as an engineer for an opening the company hadn’t even advertised.
That was almost two decades ago, but those blue water socks have served as a ramp to launch my hope and confidence in many turbulent waters since then. I remember them and their miraculous message of hope now as my husband and I face retirement in another season of financial distress with our assets reduced by forty percent just a few years before we need them. Those two blue shoes still reassure me that God knows, God cares, and God will still fashion coincidence upon coincidence to create “ordinary” miracles that exactly meet our needs and stop me in my tracks with thanks and wonder.
