Everyday Miracles

It has been a while since I blogged.  Let me catch you up.  Since July, I have completed my (additional) licensure hours and been granted full LMFT status by the state!  Yay.  Also, the company I was working for renewed their contract with the state, but it included some changes that were not optimal for my situation, so I made the transition to full time private practice (www.texasfamilyinstitute.org).  So, the past few months have been busy for me. 

The family has been busy, too!  The kids are all back in school and prospering.  Amelia is also back in school and juggling all of her roles: wife, mom, student, employee, volunteer.  So we are keeping busy.  One area that has kept all of us busy in the last week or two has been a fundraiser for our D.A.D. (Diabetic Alert Dog).  Some of our beloved church family intiated this event on our behalf and I think the original intent was to just have a garage sale and gift the proceeds toward our fundraising efforts.  The reality of it turned into a more detailed level of involvement on our part.

You see, garage sales are a lot of work.  As it turns out, fundraising garage sales are an order of magnitude more work.  The call went out for donations for the garage sale and, boy, was it answered.  Of course, this necessitated picking up some donations.  Then more sale items were offered and more were dropped off and more were picked up and the next thing we knew, it was a week away and we had not one, but TWO garages (ours and my in-laws') full to overflowing of items.  It was a mixed blessing, because of course, we needed items to sell, but the more we received, the more work it was to store, organize, and price them before the sale.  Of the items, Amelia said, "We got a lot of items you'd expect to find a garage sale, but we also got a lot of really nice items." 

With the date of the sale looming, we were a little discouraged at the amount of work required and our available time and energy.  Then our friends and families rallied and stepped up and we spent hours alongside some wonderful people who helped us prepare.  At about 2am on the night before the sale, we put the finishing touches on the signs for the sale and I walked the nearby streets to post them for the next morning.

The day of the sale, we expected some early aggressive garage sale-ers because of the advertising we'd done, but surprisingly, at our start time of 8am, we only had our helpers who had shown up at oh-dark-thirty to help set up.  However, lots of folk came by after we opened for business and we did great business all day long.  At 2pm, we started to allow haggling and sold off a lot of stuff that way and at 4pm, we shut it down. 

Now, I've titled this post: Miracles, but nothing I've written so far sounds particularly miraculous, does it?  The real miracle had been happening all along and I just didn't have eyes to see it until my friend Brian shared some insight with me.  He mentioned that sometimes it seemed like he prayed for miracles and in his mind, he was thinking of something big and supernatural, like when we pray for a cure to a sudden illness and we pray for a specific situation and a specific outcome to our problems.  But what he noticed was that God was blessing us with all the things, all the ingredients, all the relationships necessary for us to receive the financial blessing of the fundraiser.  The love that prompted our church family to initiate the event started years ago.  The loyalty and friendship that drove the donations and support didn't spring up overnight from nothingness.  There was some seemingly random kindness in the process, but when we think about God's mysterious movements in our lives, it is easy to conclude that the miracle of this garage sale has been in the works before we knew we would need it.  God's hard working hands manifested in the muscle requrired to move everything.  God's comforting arms appeared in the guise of hours of help with pricing and organizing items.  Our Father's feet trampled in and about our garages for eight hours on Saturday as people showed up in droves to purchase the offerings.  A miracle, supernatural in its very mundane-ness. 

But God has ever worked this way hasn't he?  I'll never put it past God to use flashy supernatural means, but it seems he likes to work through his people.  God's greatest miracle is relationship.  It has been that way from the beginning.  The pinacle of his creation was mankind, who was formed in God's own image, endowed with the ability to choose.  God initiated a relationship and has spent all of human history chasing his beloved creation and wooing us and invited us to know Him and be known by Him. 

This weekend, despite long hours and hard work, I was blessed to be able to grown in relationship with our church friends who came to help us out.  I met and got to share our situation with neighbors and strangers.  I got to share the joy of our fundraiser's fantastic success with the congregation who loves me and my wife and my children.  Miracles all around. 

And now, may you have eyes to see the blessings God has showered around you.  May you have ears to hear his invitation to get to know him by knowing his church.  May you receive the blessing of relationship with God through His people and come to know how much you are loved.