What do you do when your kids ask you for lunch money? When those slips of paper come home from school announcing the menu choices for the upcoming week, and you’re forced to make a decision as to which “days” merit your $3.50? Do you, like me, scramble for change all the while grumbling about inflated lunch prices and how your child will likely drink the chocolate milk and nothing else?
What do you do when your neighbor comes asking for lunch money? Literally.
Mine did today; not because he didn’t have money to purchase his own lunch, but rather because we insisted that he did … ask us for something.
You see, our neighbor is a mechanic who works exclusively on Nissan vehicles. When we moved into the parsonage six years ago and noticed that Dr. John’s Auto Clinic would be sharing a fence with us, we had no inclination of how this would prove providential and beneficial to us over the years. He’s been a “saving grace” for our vehicles. He was again this morning.
The car wouldn’t start, and Dr. John was called to the rescue. He arrived on the job early; around the fence he came, with tools in hand, knowing that our car wouldn’t budge from its current state of rest. We feared the worst. He warned us last evening of the most probable cause behind the car’s refusal to start… something about a hydraulic pump “something or something” and an uncooperative clutch.
But an hour later, our “something and something” was fixed by flushing out the old hydraulic fluid and replacing it with some new. Our neighbor asked for nothing in return. When my husband insisted, he simply requested lunch money. My husband handed him a twenty dollar bill, and Dr. John asked him if he wanted some change.
Can you even imagine?
Lunch money, friends, in exchange for the provision from God’s great storehouses of riches. It couldn’t have come at a better time; I am profoundly grateful for the gift and humbled by the ways in which God continually arrives on the scene of my life to remind me of his watchful care on my behalf.
Every day and in incalculable ways, our God shows up to show us his “God-ness”. We aren’t always privy to his arrival. In fact, most of us miss it. Why? Because we’re too busy scrambling for change in the crevices and hidden places of our daily life instead of looking up toward the open and spacious places best reserved for his sacred grandeur.
Wide and long and high and deep. That is exactly how far our Father travels to get our attention and to lavish his love upon us. To flush out our “old” and replace it with his “new”. The simplicity and the complexity of it all still stuns me and leaves me speechless. Well, almost.
Look up this day, my kindred pilgrims, and see his kingdom come. His will be done. On earth, even as it has so beautifully been done in heaven.
As always,
PS: Another satisfied customer; he made me include this…
Now, we’re packing our good-byes. Ones that cut more profoundly and with more clarity. Ones that leave me hoping that our years together have been enough to launch them in the right direction.