A Small Miracle.

Yesterday at church there were some awesome talks that referred to the idea of selfish service.  I think I've been afraid to post from the very beginning because it feels like bragging and that means that I'm guilty of selfish service.  If I do things knowing I will post them here for others to read, wondering and sort of hoping that people will think of me as a cool and giving person, then that just negates the whole purpose.  So I felt like I should just stop posting.  And after yesterday, learning more about selfish service, I wondered if I should take down the blog altogether. But I had to share an experience first.

On Sat a couple weeks ago, I had this almost fleeting idea float through my head that I should send one of my sisters-in-law fifty bucks.  An odd amount, kinda small, and I almost made it for a bit more but felt like it had to be exactly fifty bucks.  So I finished some work projects and I got her address and made the decision to send a check on Monday with some other things I had to ship.  On Sunday I taught the primary lesson because Brett was taking care of his father after a surgery.  In the lesson there was this great story about a man who was a bishop at the time that the Saints were just beginning the trek across Iowa and setting up Winter Quarters.  A single woman came to him and said that she and her children were starving and had no food.  He told his wife to give this woman some flour.  The wife said that she only had a small amount and that if she gave it away she didn't know what she would feed her own family.  The Bishop told his wife that they would be taken care of and not to worry but to have faith.  So the woman gave away the last of her flour to the starving family and later that same day a man drove a wagon over to her home and said, "The spirit told me you needed fifty bucks," and he handed her the cash. He also told her where a food wagon would be stopping nearby so she could go and buy some more flour to feed her own family.

In prepping the lesson I read this story and cried and then read it in class and cried again. It's always funny when I cry in class because the kids gets really confused, they always ask why I'm sad. They have no context for it.  Kids don't cry when they feel the spirit. (Don't get me started on that video with the baby crying while it's mother sings. Kids, let alone babies, just don't have the hardware to process feeling that way. But I digress...)  This story just solidified my desire to listen to what may be a prompting. So come Monday I sent the money off and then went to work, and kind of forgot about it.  I finally asked Brett if he had heard from her and if he knew if she got the money OK. He said she did and that she was grateful because she had to pay her property taxes that were late but she found she was fifty bucks short. 

Sometimes these kinds of things just bewilder me.  One thing that our youth speaker said yesterday that I had never heard before but made sense was that any idea we have that involves serving another person is a prompting from God.  This seems sort of obvious but I've never thought of it in such general terms.  I like it.