So… Silent Weekend (aka Sign Language Weekend) was scheduled for St Mary’s this year – halfway between new home & old home, 1 week before school… a ‘gotta go-to’ event, so I turned in my request for time off 2 weeks in advance, registered, and waited for the work schedule to come out…

I was scheduled off Thu, working 4 hrs Fri evening, and off Sat/Sun… my request had been misplaced, and most everyone else had something going on Friday night… some miscommunication and zig-zagging later, it was confirmed that Friday night was covered and I would be able to go to Silent Weekend… hours would be short for the week, but focused time with the language was more important to me… and here’s where it gets interesting…

If my leave request hadn’t been misplaced, I’m confident that I’d have been scheduled for Thursday… if my request to trade hours (to get Fri off) had been granted, I may have still been scheduled to work Thursday, but there was somewhere else I needed to be – a funeral in Columbus. The Lord knew it would be very important to me to be there to honor my friend and share love with her family – so He arranged an early night Wednesday, and Thu-Sun off, so I was able to get to the viewing, the funeral, and still make it to Silent Weekend, where I spent a couple of days with a couple of my precious teens and some old SW friends I’ve not seen in a long time.

As if the above weren’t enough, I was also provided with a check earlier in the week which covered all expenses, other circumstances provided me with unscheduled working hours, and I was protected while driving and/or sleeping (occasionally at the same time) between IN and OH. There’s one more tidbit – a special personal thing between me and departed loved ones… with time fairly short, we stopped to make the purchase, and the very particular thing I wanted was sitting on the rack, the only one of it’s kind, and exactly what I intended to get…waiting in that place, at that time, for me….

He knew that losing anyone during the past year would have shredded my resolve – He knew that losing Eileen or anyone else as precious during the school term would be an overwhelming burden because of my need to ‘say goodbye’ in person… He arranged things for me to make one trip, without jeopardizing school or job, to honor one friend and spend significant time with another (who I’ve only seen 2 minutes at a time since I moved)… There was another friend who hoped I’d come all the way to Columbus, because she had a surprise gift for me – I felt bad turning her down…then it turns out I went to Cols after all, just one more little thing that worked out…

Oh – and a Pell Grant came through, and the most recent person looking at the house is in the ‘number crunching’ phase, so it may be sold soon…

And, I’ll tell this story again, very briefly, during “testimony time” at my new church – something I still wish my former church would do – it took a few weeks before I realized that even that request, in my life, is being granted in my current situation. Time, space, and memory don’t permit me to comment on every confirmation I’ve recognized, not to mention the ones I’ve surely missed…

God is Good, All the Time… and He’s personally, intimately acquainted with my ways…my motives, my habits, my desires, my thought processes, my location, and how/when to arrange things and schedules and people to not only bring about His purposes in this world and our lives, but also to give us some of the most precious gifts that may have no great affect on the cosmos, but are very important to each of us personally. If we could see all the things He arranges just to say ‘I Know You, and I Love You’, we might actually spend more time relating to Him and less time ignoring Him…