I Pray Anyway

    

I share a story written by my brother-in-law.

It is the kind of mini-miracle I want to notice.  And he did.

Watch for them in your life and share them too, please.

They are an extra-ordinary good fortune that is unexpected and unusually good. Mini-miracles have a sense of quickening to them no matter how small.
My brother-in-law recognized this.  Here it is:

   A Christmas Story

I had an interesting Christmas experience.  It was shaping up to be a very difficult day.  This was the time two years ago that we were struggling to save Romie’s life.  In addition I was faced with the prospect of being alone Christmas Eve and morning for the first time in my life.  My son John and his wife Cara come down mid day after they visit his wife’s Mom and my son Eric and his wife Jackie normally come home for the holiday from CA but he is not well at the moment and could not travel.  That in itself was tragic.  So what to do?  I found that Romie’s sister was going to also be alone so I spent Christmas Eve with her.  In the morning I planned to go to church even though this has been very emotional for me in the past few years.  Shirley in the parish has been very supportive and I normally sit with her but she was going to church Christmas Eve.  Nonetheless I thought I would find someone I knew.  In the morning I fired up my courage, found my old red Christmas sweater at the bottom of a trunk, and ventured off to church.  When I arrived there was only one car there and I then suddenly realized that most go to church Christmas Eve.  I was faced with the prospect of sitting alone and it occurred to me that this might be the occasion where I finally came completely unstuck.  I was not looking forward to going into church.  At that moment another car pulled up and a very animated guy emerged and came quickly to where I was standing.  “Good morning, Merry Christmas and how are you doing today.”  He was a stranger and so animated and friendly that my first reaction was that he was some sort of aberration.  Strangers are not normally that outgoing and I really expected that after we greeted he would disappear in a puff of smoke.  Not so he was a real person and we went into church together.  The ones who were there were all sitting on the left but my family has always sat in the same pew on the right.  The prospect was that I would be really alone there so I asked the stranger if he would care to join me and he was very pleased.  We visited a bit before the service.  It turned out that he lives in Florida and was visiting the area.  He is an Episcopalian and very familiar with the service and had researched the local churches to find ours. He was very friendly and outgoing so much so that this saved the day for me.  During the service I spent some time wiping away tears and I think he noticed.  At the end we got onto the subject of what ails me and he was enormously supportive.  Out of the blue he suggested “why don’t you become a deacon?”  This was odd in that I have been thinking about what I could do in the future that might benefit mankind in some way.  Becoming a deacon was not under consideration but not knowing what I have been contemplating how did he happen to suggest something on a humanitarian level?  Further on in the conversation he said “you are fortunate that your wife went first and she does not have to suffer as you are doing.”  This was also odd in that this has been my train of thought as well.

All of this struck me as unusual so I have written it down.  There are several scenarios that might explain the experience.  One is that this man who is very outgoing happened to arrive at the right time and happened to meet someone who needed support.  The minimum take away is that there can be a profound effect when one human meets another on this level.  Another scenario is that his being there was the result of intervention on a divine level.  How did it happen that an outgoing empathetic stranger arrived just then?  It turned out to be a good day.