My God is a small God. Some people have big Gods, Old Testament style Gods, who do mighty works. Mine pretty much finds things I’ve lost. Maybe my prayers are being monitored by a guardian angel that is particularly adept at finding things and not much else. In any case, it’s a miracle story I offer here.
I’ve been praying lately for money to solve an assortment of pesky obligations that would clean up my checkered past and allow me to proceed with the rest of my life without that burden. It would not enrich me; just de-stress me, so it doesn’t seem too much to ask.
I would hazard a guess that not many people actually get their prayers for cold cash answered. Since I don’t buy lottery tickets, I’m not even giving God an easy way to provide for me. And I’m probably not taking into consideration that He already does in His own way. I manage to get the bills paid every month, even when it involves transferring a debt from one credit card to another.
But so far, every single prayer to find my cat has been answered, usually within 20 minutes if not sooner. I have a cat that gets lost several times a year, and I’ll put in an hour or two searching for him without heavenly intervention, and then, weary and frustrated, I finally pray. I delay so long because I hate to bother God with prayers about finding a renegade cat. And then, I find him. I find him where he wasn’t a moment ago – which is not unusual for cats.
One time I found him in a particularly dramatic heavenly way. When we lived in a house surrounded by woods, he had been gone for several hours. Both my husband and I had searched through the underbrush as long as we had daylight and then with flashlights until our legs and arms were bleeding from the briars and thorns. My husband was particularly attached to this cat and was almost in tears when I told him we should give up; it just wasn’t meant to be. He went inside and I returned to the yard to collect one of our other cats, a good girl who never strayed and was helping us look for the lost cat.
Walking across the lawn, I said a silent prayer that for my husband’s sake, could God please locate the missing cat, scoop him up and drop him in our yard? I bent to pick up the good cat and the motion detector light attached to the garage came on. Right in the middle of the pool of light sat the missing cat, as if he had dropped from the sky and landed in a spot he had not been one second ago.
I’ve grown accustomed to these little miracles. It’s not just the cat, but many other missing and misplaced items that only turn up after I’ve prayed.
So, after another morning of a prayer turned up the lost cat again, I contemplated why I had a God that was so good at the small things, but didn’t trust me with $50,000? Well, I thought, how about something a little harder. Find my husband’s sunglasses.
I had never prayed about the sunglasses before because it was my husband’s problem more than mine. On the daily roster of things causing me stress, it ranked low, even though I had wasted several hours that week looking for them. They had been missing for a week and I had already conducted several thorough searches of the house, yard and both cars. They were nowhere. I quizzed my husband repeatedly about the last time he remembered having them, and he stuck to the same story that they had been in his way while he was sawing a branch off the crepe myrtle tree and he remembers putting them on a shelf in the bathroom. We assumed they had fallen off the shelf into the wastebasket below and went out unnoticed with the trash. They were gone for good.
A few hours after I offered that challenge, a challenge I didn’t think God would take seriously since I was so sure the sunglasses were in the county dump, I was sitting on a bench in the backyard, keeping an eye on the wandering cat again. And then I saw them, the sunglasses, in the grass next to the crepe myrtle.
How could this be? Surely we had looked around the crepe myrtle as part of the initial search? I had been in this very spot several times during the week, watching the cats. That very morning when I was searching for the lost cat, I had looked under the bushes next to the crepe myrtle. If the glasses were there then, wouldn’t I have seen them?
The only possible answer was they weren’t there then. My guardian angel, on assignment from God and hearing my foolish challenge that morning, had flown to the dump, gotten the glasses and dropped them where I would be sitting that afternoon. It’s a miracle.
It’s a miracle that reminds me my prayers are heard and that I should have more faith that even the big things will work out the way He intends for me, in His own time.
