Unnoticed Miracles

Last Monday night we weren't sure what lesson to give for family night so we decided to have one of the kids pull an object out of our FHE grab bag and give a lesson on whatever came out. After we went through all of the torment of reasoning with our other 3 kids and explaining why Brooklyn was going to be the grabber this time she reached in and pulled out a journal. Okay. So the lesson was to be about writing in our journals. I figured I might be able to pull this one off because I kind of sort of actually have a journal if you're allowed to count blogs and so I wouldn't come off as completely hypocritical. The kids were ready to have the lesson as soon as she pulled it out of the bag so this didn't allow for a whole lot of prep time. Fortunately I had just watched the short video posted on lds.org where Henry B. Eyring talked about writing in his own journal. He explained how when he was much younger he decided that he was going to write in his journal every day about how he saw the hand of God at work in his life. ( I know this sounds like something from Oprah Winfrey but apparently she wasn't the first person to think about trying something like this.) I decided this was what I would talk about with the kids. I have always believed that miracles happen all around us every day and sadly go unnoticed. This was confirmed to me at the end of my lesson as I began to try to come up with examples to share of what I might write about for that day.
The first example I shared came from our bike ride to the library we'd gone on. After we arrived we parked our bikes and were in the library for quite a while. When we came back out and I started to get back on my bike I noticed that someone had tampered with my left brake, completely disconnecting it. This wouldn't have been that bad if my right brake hadn't already been completely useless due to a missing pad. As I fiddled with it I started considering whether or not I could get a hold of John at work so that he could come rescue me. I pretty much ruled that out since it's been impossible to contact him at work ever since he became a manager. In the old days I could call him any time of the day however often I felt like to ask him things like, "Hey John, do you know where the remote control is?" "Hey honey, what color do you think I should paint my toenails?" "John, I have an itch, do you think you could come home and scratch it?" I was given a new role along with his. I suddenly had to become a little bit more independent. Which means fixing my own brakes on my bike when stranded at the library. I have to say, there was a time in my life when I knew everything there was to know about my mountain bike. I could take it apart and put it back together again no problem. But since I've been married (and gotten a new bike) there's just never been a need for me to know such trivial things. That's what husbands are for. So as I tried to fix my brake at the library I felt and probably looked a lot like a monkey with a socket wrench. The only person around was a lady next to me preparing to embark her own bike for departure. She heard me lamenting about my brake and came to have a look. Somehow she knew that the doohicky had to be unscrewed and the thingamabob needed to be pulled taut and inserted just so and...voila'. My brake was functioning again. I thanked her and as I rode away I looked back at her once more to consider whether or not she had been an angel. This was fleeting though and I forgot about her and the incident almost instantly and would not have remembered it again if it had not been for my random lesson on keeping journals.
The second example happened on my way home from WalMart that day. As the kids and I were approaching our neighborhood I saw 3 dogs running down the sidewalk next to a busy street without an owner. I felt compelled to stop and pick them up. I had the kids walk down the sidewalk to try to coax them into the car. The two giant ones got in without hesitation and the medium one took off running. I drove the two big ones home and stuck them in my back yard. When I was done wiping the hair and dog slobber off of my gallons of milk I picked up the phone to call the number that was on their licenses. If you are a person that sometimes tries to call me you will not be surprised to know that of my 3 different lines, none of them were working. I can not tell you why for sure but I think it's some sort of conspiracy or practical joke being played on me. If ever one of my phones isn't working all I have to do is hand it to John and it will start working. And it has nothing to do with the "monkey/socket wrench" thingy because I KNOW how to use a phone. Anyway, I started panicking a little bit because I felt like I needed to inform these people ASAP that I had their dogs. After pressing redial on each of my 3 phones over and over for the next 20 minutes Brooklyn came in the house and said that a lady had come for her dogs. She lived about a half mile from our neighborhood and had been driving around asking people if they'd seen 3 dogs go by. She drove into our cul-de-sac at the exact time that Brooklyn went out to get something out of the car. She asked Brooklyn if she'd seen her dogs and Brooklyn said, "Yeah. They're in our back yard." She thanked us and said she wasn't worried about the other one because as long as he didn't have the 2 big ones with him, he'd come straight back home. Again, if not for my family home evening lesson this is something I would have forgotten completely.
One could argue that these were simply coincidences, but I prefer to think of them as miracles. I like to picture angels all over the place helping out whenever they can.
After the lesson I decided that we should start coming up with miracles we saw that day each night before bed. We have done that a total of 0 times which makes me sad because I wonder what kinds of things we have overlooked since then. However, I did have something stick in my memory despite my negligence in writing it down. Last weekend we went to a family reunion where John and I had been assigned to prepare dinner with another family. Since we were going to be traveling a long distance to get there we decided to let them buy the food and we would reimburse our share. When it was time to prepare the taco salad the person who had done the shopping told me that she hadn't bought any tortilla chips or taco shells because she felt like the dinner was getting too expensive. She thought they could just eat the taco fixings off their plates but I wasn't sure everyone would think that was such a good idea. Wouldn't that be similar to eating sandwiches without bread or spaghetti without noodles? I didn't say anything but I secretly panicked about it for a while until somebody opened one of the otherwise empty cupboards and found boxes and boxes of taco shells. We don't know how they got there but we accepted them as a gift from heaven and were able to have taco salad with taco shells for dinner.
What I thought was interesting about this was that while we were discussing our little gift one of the people at the reunion scoffed at the notion that heaven could have had anything to do with it. He made it very clear to whoever he could that he had lost his faith somewhere along the way. What struck me about this was that this person had just recently recovered from lymphoma. Not a miracle that easily goes unnoticed. It just goes to show that it doesn't matter the size of the miracle. It could be the parting of the Red Sea but if you are a faithless person you will find a way to rationalize it away. I prefer to look at everything as a miracle rather than picking and choosing because if miracles really do exist, then everything is a miracle, isn't it?