"X"

A week ago, I loaned our dog brush to my niece, Katie, to use on their dog, Rosie. In the area for a glorious annual family gathering, a group of them had just returned from a walk around our local wildlife refuge, and Rosie came home with enough grass seeds to start a new lawn. Katie took the brush with her to the other family home nearby, and somehow in all the comings and goings between our two homes, it hadn’t found its way back to its place on the shelf in the dog cupboard.

This morning, as we sat out in our Adirondack chairs, coffee in hand, I grabbed my phone and FaceTimed her to ask about the dog brush. She answered, solved the dog brush mystery, and then said, “It’s so amazing you called just now. I was praying about “X, and thinking about you and Tom.” What followed was a thoughtful conversation about “X”. We listened, holding space for her questions, concerns, and wonderings. We weighed in with a few relevant thoughts from our own experiences, and as it turned out, those few thoughts shed some good, hopeful light on “X”.

We all agreed that our spur of the moment conversation felt like a God thing. One of those times when timing just works out. You have a thought, you act on it, and suddenly it connects to “X”. You say a prayer about “X” and suddenly a bit of light is shed on something.

I think that’s how God works. Doors get opened, dots get connected, light get shed, and God will use whatever is at hand to move things along, including us.

God is nothing if not mysterious. I thought I was calling about a dog brush, but as it turned out, I was calling about “X”.