I am so excited to share this story, because it involves a little drama, timing of events that could only be orchestrated by God, and a lovely little picture of how God provides for His children. I also love this story, because we got to be the recipients of this little miracle.
It all started with a journey.
Our day began quiet and hopeful, having just left church in Wisconsin for the last time in a few months. Hours were spent in silence as the boys caught some much-needed naps, and many more hours were spent listening to Elmo in Grouchland and hoping the next selection would be anything made by Pixar, or at least not involving muppets. Finally, nine o’clock rolled around, and we breathed a sigh of relief: Elmo was done for the day and we would have smooth sailing for the last couple hours of our trip, and smooth it went, other than a few hiccups involving a certain 2-year-old who has discovered that when he says “Potty!”, Mommy and Daddy jump to attention. We finally arrived, and fortunately we were more or less on schedule. Unfortunately, our door was locked and our key was behind it. Even more unfortunately, “on time” meant we arrived when we expected to- at 1:30 in the morning.
I tried desperately to keep the kids either sleeping or happy while Rhett took an inordinate amount of time waking up the holder of the keys to get a spare. As the minutes ticked by, I tried to imagine what hardships he must have been enduring, waking this poor woman up in the wee hours of the morning to let us into our house. Though a sweet and personable woman by day, I had never encountered her after midnight, and had no idea how she would react to the sudden intrusion into her sleep time.
Anyhoo, Rhett saunters back to the car, swinging the spare key, and whistling, I’m pretty sure. Not only was she just a dear in the middle of the night, but he also got to see a little miracle. The story goes like this:
Rhett walked up to the door, and rang the doorbell. And rang it again. And knocked. Having no success, but also having no idea what else to do, he rang the bell yet again. As he was standing there, ringing the bell and trying to figure out another, hopefully more successful course of action, he noticed the neighbor’s dog, Trouble, come out to, um, use the facilities. Use the lack of facilities? Whatever. The dog needed to go.
Anyways, Rhett quietly calls out “Jim?” assuming that the dog didn’t let himself out. His assumption was correct. Jim was standing inside the door, looking quite unprepared for guests. Rhett asked Jim (also quite sweet-spirited for being the middle of the night) if he could use his phone to call Tanya to get the spare key, since they weren’t answering the door. Now, all of this might not sound too miracle-ish to you, but I’ll get to the cool part:
Jim and his wife were suddenly wakened from their sleep by a loud noise. Looking around, they saw that a picture had “just happened” to fall off their wall. I think the angels were dancing a little too roughly and just bumped it off, but that is just a theory. So, seeing this picture on the wall, they notice that their dog isn’t in his normal place, but was instead in their hallway, gagging. Finding this to be strange, Jim got up and let the dog out, only to find a somewhat disheveled Rhett standing right outside his door. The rest is history.
I love it that God uses dancing angels and gagging dogs to get us a good night’s sleep 🙂
Grandpa Stous says
We enjoyed reading your blog. Trust you all are feeling better. We’ve been praying for you. We enjoyed your snail mail card too.
We are both doing really well, Praise the Lord.