Frustrated as I searched for something, I grabbed my phone and texted a short message to my son, “Please pray that I will find this lost item.”
He believes in the power of prayer. At least he does now. Years ago, he seemed skeptical. A couple months into the school year I realized he needed more slacks. On our “Stay-at-home-mom” budget, I worked hard to stretch the dollars so that we could live on one income. That meant that shortly after we moved to El Dorado, I visited all the grocery stores with a page or two of basic items written on the lines. I went through the stores filling in prices on my homemade spread sheet. I wanted to know the lowest place to purchase each. I also shopped sales and stocked up when possible and haunted yard sales for clothes, fun stuff and basics.
So as I prepared for a morning of yard sales that day, I told the my son, “you need more slacks for school. I am going to pray that I find some for you at the yard sales today.”
He looked at me as if I had a hole in my head. I could almost hear him thinking, “New jeans come from the store, not yard sales.”
“I can pray about that,” I assured him.
I could also go to the store and pick up the slacks if necessary, but, as I said, I considered it my job to stretch the impossible budget. He left for school. I gathered up my list of Friday yard sale addresses and my purse.
Before I ever crossed the city line, I spotted a yard sale alongside the highway with tables of clothes. I hit the brakes and pulled over.
I spotted a stack of boy’s jeans in various colors. Today jeans only come in blue, torn blue and shredded blue and now some companies are actually charging top dollar for deliberately dirty blue. Back then stores sold whole, clean jeans.
“Do you have any little boys’ jeans?” I asked.
“Yes, we do. My son just went through a growth spurt right after I bought him plenty of jeans for the year. I think he wore them maybe once, and then they did not fit.” She walked over to the edge of the table where she had laid seven pairs of neatly folded jeans.
I picked up the top pair, read the size and the price. All seven pairs would cost as much as one pair of new jeans from the store. They looked and felt brand new. I didn’t usually buy seven pairs at a time, but such a bargain he could have an extra pair or two. God provided above all that I had asked or considered.
“I’ll take all of them,” I said.
I didn’t find anything else at that sale. I didn’t need to. I already had found more than I had requested in my prayer.
So when I texted him recently, “Pray that I would find something I need to have it by tomorrow afternoon,” he prayed. Later he texted back, “did you find it?”
Good question. I had looked high and low, emptied out drawers and straightened closets. I even cleared the cubbies in the car and found nothing.
After I sent the text, my husband mentioned, “Did you look in the laundry room on the shelves?”
I walked in, looked up and there on the overflowing shelf my search ended.
“Thank you, Lord,” I whispered, then I called and told my no longer skeptical son that God does care about things like school clothes and lost articles.