God Drives a Tow Truck (16 page)

Spots of course did not live forever. She lived a good long life and died. In my opinion, she is waiting patiently in Heaven to be reunited with her beloved family. I know God works in most mysterious ways, and I am praying He is busily building the stairway that will direct my parents to the dog that briefly revealed to them a glimpse of the Lord. In the meantime, I like to picture Him scratching her behind her ears, while she waits.

Chapter Twenty Three

The Widgets

1 Chronicles 5: 20

He answered their prayers, because they trusted in him.

He was the first person with a two year degree to receive the designation “scientist” by IBM. He also almost failed high school, and even more remarkably, managed to navigate his way out of his impossibly messy room to get to the school bus stop each day. My brother John was a late bloomer, who ultimately not only bloomed but became an overpowering bouquet, a testament to the power of parents giving him the space and time to “find himself”. John, the child who never wanted to read, to my literary mother’s despair, became a voracious reader and knowledgeable about
everything
, including the origin of the pencil.

He held several patents for electronic gadgets I had no hope of understanding, and had an illustrious career with IBM. I didn’t understand all that he did, or even most of it. I knew it involved electrical engineering and teeny little circuit boards that he sometimes discussed with me, calling them “widgets”. He knew that a more technical word might elude my feeble brain. He showed me pictures of his beautifully complex “widgets” with pride.

John rarely called, but when he did, it was always as though he had just seen me yesterday and we still lived one room over. John was one of those people that didn’t talk much about God, but he certainly showed a deep concern for God’s creation. As a teenager, on his early morning paper route, he once found a small bird right after it crashed into a frosty window. He gathered the tiny body in his warm hands, and blew warm air on it. He pressed gently on its little chest to restart its heart. He told me he raised its tiny feet, since he thought that is what one did to treat shock. Despite his heroic efforts, the little bird died. I may be remembering the specifics of that story a little inaccurately, but the impression of the deeply entrenched kindness of my brother has never left me.

One day, in his typically unpredictable manner, he phoned me, after months of silence.

“I have a problem and I need your prayer,” he said. At that point, he had never professed any kind of belief that I was aware of, nor shown any tendency to trust in prayer. In fact, he always told me that engineers don’t “hope”, they “make it happen.” Thus his call for prayer was quite unexpected.

“I know you have a direct line to God,” he said, “And I need some divine intervention.”

“I can’t promise you anything,” I told John, “But I will certainly pray for you. What’s up?”

“I am delivering 100 boxes of widgets tomorrow morning,” he told me, “And when we built them, they worked. But I have been testing them for hours, and they no longer work.”

“Well can’t you fix them yourselves? I don’t want to bother God unless we have to.”

“There is no reason they shouldn’t be working. They should work. I have taken them apart and analyzed everything. They should work, but they don’t. And if they don’t work in the morning, I am screwed.”

“Is there someone there who can help you?” I asked.

“My manager and I have been poring over them for hours. We are completely stymied.”

“OK,” I said, “Then I will pray. But remember, God doesn’t always answer prayer exactly as we hope. He will answer the prayer, but only in the way that is best. It is possible it is not best that your widgets work.”

“If my widgets don’t work, I am fired,” said John, “So ask God if He would answer it the way I think is best just this one time.”

“What exactly am I praying for?” I asked.

“A miracle,” he said, dispiritedly, “Gotta go and keep working on the widgets.”

I got off the phone and prayed for John’s widgets.

The next morning, I had forgotten the phone call and was busily dealing with our dog and his disgusting propensity to roll in dead animals. My hands were covered in globs of wet dog hair when the phone rang.

“Did you pray?” asked John, without saying hello.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well it worked,” he said, “After getting off the phone with you, I just gave up. There was nothing more I could do, so I sealed the boxes and sent them. I just got the call. They worked… Every one of them.”

I was dumbfounded. I
do
believe in God, and in His miracles, but I don’t believe He has the time or inclination to answer each and every request, let alone so explicitly to our specifications. Nor do I even trust that I know enough to make good requests. I think He probably
does
know best. I was flabbergasted, even more so than John.

“You did nothing to make them work?”

“No,” he said.

“Well I hope you let your manager know who to give the glory to.”

“Oh yes,” he said, “This morning my manager called and asked how I got them to work. I told him my sister prayed.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “I told him there was nothing more I could do, so you prayed, and God made them work.”

From that time on, John asked me for prayer often. I am not sure that we ever had such a miraculous and immediate answer again… at least not such an obviously direct one. After a few more calls from him requesting prayer, I told him that while I would always pray for him, it was time for him to pray on his own.

“I have given you all the lessons you need, John. Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. It is time for you to start praying.”

“But you have such a direct connection,” he argued.

“No more than anyone,” I laughed.

“Well okay,” he said, “I’ll try.”

I have prayed for many things that don’t come to pass as I had hoped or prayed. There were many heart breaking requests, that for whatever reason, God has not seen fit to mend. I don’t claim to understand the ways of God, nor have any special influence. But I do know that it was God that made John’s widgets stop working, and it was God who made them work again. It may be what convinced John that God is even bigger than IBM.

Chapter Twenty Four

Not Trifling Hardship

Nehemiah 9:32

“Now therefore, O our God, the great mighty, and awesome God, who keeps His covenant of love, do not let all this hardship seem trifling in your eyes…”

“Hey Mom, I am calling cause it’s a God thing, and I knew you would enjoy this story.”

Parenting is not for the weak, or the timid, or the ignorant- though I am often all three. I take great comfort in the verse that God is made perfect in our weakness, because then I am assured of His perfection when He is near
me
.

My children afforded me unique opportunities to demonstrate how woefully ill-equipped I was to handle the rigors of parenthood. Anders, my first born, was as perfect a baby as anyone could hope for- uncomplaining, quiet, peaceful, and eerily content. I was certain that no one on earth was a better mother than me.

The second one, Matthias brought a much needed dose of humility. He was not a
bad
baby in the sense that Attila or Pol Pot were bad, but he was definitely more difficult than the complacent Anders. Matt had allergies, undiagnosed till later in life, and he was never content. He had colic which resulted in many sleepless nights. When he
did
sleep, it was never for long. He was in perpetual motion and talked incessantly. He loved people and was forever breaking my heart befriending people who then showed little understanding of what loyalty as a friend entailed. He wanted everything he laid his eyes on, showing a disturbing materialistic streak. Whenever a commercial would come on TV with some new toy, he would perk up and point at it, “I WANT DAT!”

He was always plotting to get what he knew he couldn’t or shouldn’t have.

“I want candy,” he told me.

“No, you just had dessert. You can’t have candy.”

He drummed his fingers, thinking.

“I want medicine,” he said.

“You are not sick, you don’t need medicine,” I replied, knowing it was the tasty sugar in the medicine he was after.

“I
need
a cough drop!” he proclaimed.

“You don’t have a cough. You are healthy. Now go play.”

He tapped his fingers on the countertop and came up with his last ploy, “I NEED vitamins.”

And that was life with Matt, one long negotiation and carefully crafted argument after another. He wisely became involved in Debate Club during our home school days, and in his early junior high years, decided he would become an attorney someday. It was a perfect choice for someone who loved to argue.

I worried a little about how this child who was always looking for the loophole, and for the flaws in traditional wisdom, would grow up in his relationship with God. I tried my best to model Godly behavior and to teach him Godly wisdom in an intellectually sound
enough
manner that he would trust and remain in a close walk with God. I know that I fell short over and over again.

“Oh Lord, fill in the gaps!” I prayed.

I tried to honor God, and model God, in helping those who were less fortunate than us. I kept a “homeless person” bag in the van. When we passed homeless people on a street corner, I would have Matt roll down the window, (though of course, lock the door) and hand the person the bag filled with food, and a Bible verse. Since we lived in a fairly nice area, there were not many homeless people to bless with our largesse, but there were
some.
I would always cheer to myself when I saw one in the distance, waiting at an intersection. An opportunity to show Matt spontaneous generosity motivated by God! I didn’t know how Matt was processing this lesson, and if so, what his wildly creative brain was doing with the information. I developed a rich and vigorous prayer life largely because of Matt.

I sent him off to a large, secular college, with some trepidation. He was definitely a brilliant young man, but a little disorganized, a little too concerned with what others thought of him, and a little too wacky in his interpretations of life. So it was with great anticipation that I answered that phone call from him, anxious to hear what he considered the “
God-thing
” I would want to hear.

“I met a homeless guy under the bridge today,” he told me, “I had a hard time understanding him but he asked me for money. So I told him, I couldn’t give him money, but I would get him some coffee. “

“That was smart,” I told him, knowing money will sometimes be used for drugs or alcohol in this downtrodden population.