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| MORE MIRACLES Miracles are occurring all the time. God is performing them every day without fail. Did you see the sun rise this morning? Did you see the smile on your children's faces? Or, are you reading this right now thinking how grateful you should be to God for giving you sight. Yes, small miralcles, large miracle happen everywhere, all the time, in the simplest moments or in those times when you are praying so much that God answers unbelievably. From this point on, you will read about miracles that have happen to people, some with other people with God working through them, and others just because God is God. Without Him we are nothing, but with Him we can accomplsh anything. |
| Angels, Once In A While Barbara Irwin Ritz In September 1960, I woke up one morning with six hungry babies and just 75 cents in my pocket. Their father was gone! The five boys ranged for three months to seven years and their sister was two. Their Dad have never been much more than a presence they feared. Whenever they heard his tires crunch on the gravel driveway they would scramble to hide under their beds. He did manage to leave $15 a week to buy groceries, but now that he had decided to leave, there would be no more beatings, but no food either. If there was a welfar system in southern Indiana, I certainly knew nothing about it. So, I scrubbed the kids until they looked brand new, put on my best homemade dress, loaded them into the rusty old '51 Chevy, and drove off to find a job. The seven of us went to every factory, store, and restaurant in our small town. No luck! The kids stayed crammed into the car and tried to be quiet while I tried to convince who ever would listen that I was willing to learn anything, I had to have a job. Still, No luck! The last place we went to was an old Root Beer Barrel drive-in, just a few miles out of town, that had been converted to a truck stop. It was called the Big Wheel. An old lady, named Granny, owned the place, and she peeked out the window from time to time at all those kids. She needed someone on the graveyard shift, 11 at night until seven 7 in the morning. She paid 65 cents an hour, and I could start that night. I raced home and called the teenager down the street that baby-sat for people. I bargained with her to come and sleep on my sofa for a dollar a night. She could arrive with her pajamas on and the kids would aready be asleep. This seemed like a good arrangement to her, so we made a deal. That night when the little ones and I knelt to say our prayers, we all thanked God for finding Mommy a job, and so I started at the Big Wheel that evening. When I got home in the mornings, I woke the baby-sitter and sent her home with one dollar of my tip money--fully half of what I averaged every night. As the weeks went by, heating bills added a strain to my meager wage. The tires on the old Chevy had the consistency of penny balloons and began to leak. I had to fill them with air on the way to work and again every morning before I could go home. One bleak fall morning, I draggged myself to the car to go home and found four tires in the back seat. New Tires! There was a no note, no nothing, just those beautiful brand new tires. Had angels taken up residence in Indiana, I wondered? I made a deal wilth the local service station. In exchange for his mounting the new tires, I would clean up his office. I remember it took me a lot longer to scrub his floor than it did for him to do the tires, but still I had, 'New Tires!' I was now working six nights instead of five, and it still wasn't enough. Christmas was coming, and I knew there would be no money for toys for the kids. I found a can of red paint and started repairing and painting some old toys. Then I hid them in the basement so there would be something for Santa to deliver on Christmas morning. Clothes were a worry, too. I was sewing patches on top of patches on the boys pants and soon they would be too far gone to repair. Oh, well, all we could do was pray and hope! On Christmas Eve, the usual customers were drinking coffee in the Big Wheel. There were the truckers, Les, Frank, and Jim, and a state trooper named Joe. A few musicians were hanging aroung after a gig at the Legion and were dropping nickles in the pinball machine. The regulars just sat around and talked through the wee hours of the morning and then left to get home before the sun came up. When it was time for me to go home at seven o'clock Christmas morning, to my amazement, my old battered Chevy was filled full to the top with boxes of all shapes and sizes. I quickly opened the driver's side door, crawled inside, and keeled in the front facing the back seat. Reaching back, I pulled off the lid of the top box. Inside was a whole case of little blue jeans, sizes 2-10! I looked inside another box. It was full of shirts to go with the jeans. Then I peeked inside some of the other boxes. There was candy and nuts and bananas and bags of groceries. There was an enormous ham for baking, and canned vegetables and potatoes. There was pudding and Jell-O and cookies, pie filling and flour. There was a whole bag of laundry supplies and cleaning items. And there were five toy trucks and one beautiful doll. As I drove back through the empty streets, the sun slowly rose on the most amazing Christmas Day of my life. I was sobbing with gratitide, and I will never forget the joy on the faces of my little ones that precious morning. . Yes, there were angels in Indiana that long ago December, and they all hung out at the Big Wheel truck stop ....... Additional: THE POWER OF PRAYER! I believe that God only gives three answers to prayer: 1. "Yes!" 2. "Not Yet!" 3. "I (God) have something better in mind!" God still sits on the throne. The devil is a liar. You may be going through a tough time right now, but God is getting ready to bless you in a way you cannot imagine..... |