Musings

Small Miracles

Carol could no longer remember a life without sorting, wrapping and packing. Sifting through two decades of what she had once thought were treasures, throwing away items she finally felt she might not need for some undefined emergency or as a reminder of a special moment many years past. Looking at old photos of loved ones no longer with her, through either death or distance. Entirely too many now through death.

“But that’s what happens as I get older,” Carol thought. She held the doll that her grandfather had given her when she was seven years old, the rubber nose nibbled flat by mice. She sat down and cried again, for what must have been the fifth time that week. “I’m tired of memories. I don’t want to think any more,” she muttered to herself.

But how could she throw away the reminders of her entire life and move over a thousand miles away from Texas, leaving family and friends, to a place where everything and everyone would be strange to her? Her life was a miserable blur from the combined pressure of having to be out of home – and her land - in less than a week and her sadness over leaving people she loved and needed.

This land near Austin had been the dream of Carol and her husband, Henry, for over a decade. It wasn’t just their security against old age. It was their very own park, private and green and paid for through years of saving. Their horses ran across the fields in the morning fog, the deep pounding of their hooves heard long before they would emerge from the tree line in front of the small mobile home they had camped in for almost three years. They had planned to build their house there eventually and pay as they went, so no mortgage company could hold the papers. It was their part of the earth.

When Henry began to have back problems every day and the effort required to run their own business in town kept them from being able to keep up the land and fences and buildings, they had to stop and think about their future. Could they continue to do this? Working long hours at the office and then coming home late at night to continue work on the land was wearing thin.

In the end, they decided life was too short to work so much. They were both fifty-three, and at the rate they were going, they might not be around to enjoy the future they had hoped to have on their beautiful hill. And the heat of Texas summers was beginning to overwhelm both of them.

So they decided to sell the land and the business and move to a cooler climate with a simpler life. Everything happened so fast after that October. The land sold to the first people who came to look at it, and they found someone to take over the business right away. It was now set in stone. They were moving.

Carol cried often, wondering how she had come to this. She kept telling herself that she should be happy, that things happen for a reason, that things wouldn’t move so rapidly unless it was meant to be.

She had always looked for signs, for confirmation that she was doing what God wanted her to do in her life. She’d always thought if she listened hard enough, she would be led down the right path. Many people said her signs were simply coincidence, but she always thought that we have miracles everyday. “We just need to look for them,” she often told her friends.

Her first sign was a double rainbow that appeared after an incredibly quick rain than came and went within five minutes while they were showing their land to the prospective buyers. But she still had my doubts. Then as she was saying her prayers a few nights later, she heard “Ezekiel 11-13” in her mind. Not being sure what this meant or if she had actually heard anything, she got up to find the Bible. She was not even sure Ezekiel was a section in it, but discovered it had already been packed in a box that was now at a storage building. So Carol got on the computer and found an Internet site that had the full Bible, and while the passage itself didn’t make much sense to her or her situation, the notation for that passage at the bottom of the page said, “Now is not the time to build a house.” “Thank you, God,” she thought, for having the patience to give me two miracles and such a non-equivocal one at that.

So a month passed, and she was still sorting and packing. The last few days were here, and it was getting harder instead of easier. She held on to the signs she had been given, hoping it was the right thing, to leave her land and horses, her family and friends.

While packing the boxes that had been out in the garage for years without even being missed in their daily lives, she found a dime. “Good,” she thought, “one more little sign.” For over twenty years, she had always considered dimes to be lucky for her. When she found a penny or nickel, she would usually leave them for someone else to find and be excited over. But a dime was meant especially for her. Carol stuck it in her pocket.

The next day, she found another dime. She smiled and put it her pocket also. The third day, late in the afternoon, as she was still packing, she remembered the dimes and thought, “Where’s my dime today, God? Haven’t I been a good person?” She pulled another box of books from the current stack she was working on, sorting the ones she wanted to keep and stacking others into a box for the local library. At the bottom of the book box was another dime.

For each day that entire week, as she sorted and packed tools, art supplies, old clothes and dishes, she found a dime. In boxes of nothing but books, or boxes of pots and pans. Places where dimes should not be. Through all of her emotional turmoil and lapses of faith, God found a way to give her small miracles.

Regina Calton Burchett
January 1, 2004

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