I think the Lord blesses our lives in ways that we often don't notice. This week, I noticed the Lord blessing two of my sweet children in a small, but very special way. I'm sure if I look harder, I would see evidences of this kind of thing quite often.
My sweet Rachel, who has earned quite a bit of money lately babysitting, wanted to buy a birthday present for Josh. She didn't know what, but she wanted it to be something he would really like. While I was shopping at Costco last week, I saw a table full of Seahawks t-shirts with the numbers and names of players on them. They resembled jerseys, but were t-shirts, and were only $20. I thought Rachel might like to get that for Josh, so I asked her about it. (I thought about buying one while I was there and asking Rachel later, but decided against it.) Rachel thought that was a great idea. I had seen the shirts on Thursday and we went shopping on Monday. There were two shirts left - both XL (which is entirely too big). I asked an employee about the shirts and she said they had sold out in less than a day. We were sad, but we wandered around to see if there was another suitable present. There was a cool looking book that was shaped like and felt like a 2D football, and was about college football. There were a few of them in the stack. Rachel decided that would be a pretty good gift and she bought it. On the drive home, she noticed some sort of hardened goo on the outside of the book. She decided she wanted to return it and get a replacement. I told her I would do a little later in the week.
On Tuesday morning, I was thinking about my plans for the day. Sarah had preschool from 9:20-11:50 and I was helping in Emilee's class from 10:30-11:00. I had the thought that I should do some housework before helping in class and then go to Costco after. Costco is a 12-13 minute drive from the school and a 10 minute drive from preschool. This would leave about 25 minutes for returning the gift and shopping, if everything went perfectly. This was a bad plan, but I couldn't let it go. I decided to go for it.
Everything went perfectly at Emilee's school and I was in the van at 10:58. I got to Costco a little before 11:15. I walked into the store and there was a line at the return desk. Thankfully, it went pretty quickly. I got a cart, went into the store, and walked straight to the book section. I walked past the table that had held the t-shirts and it was still empty. There were no more books left. My heart sank. So I walked through the store and did my shopping. I kept my eyes open for anything that Josh might like, but there was nothing. After getting my groceries, I decided to walk through the book section one more time to see if I had missed something. I hadn't. So I walked out the other end and noticed a couple of employees next to the empty table. They had just unloaded a box of t-shirts and had several more boxes next to them. It was a new shipment of the very t-shirts Rachel had wanted to buy for Josh. I was so excited! I walked up to them and asked which players they had. They didn't have Josh's favorite, but they had his second favorite. So one of the employees dug through the box she was getting ready to unload to find me the right size for Josh's t-shirt. I grabbed the shirt, went to check out, and got to Sarah's preschool at the end of the pickup window.
If I had listened to the first prompting and just bought the shirt, none of this would have happened. But since I didn't, the Lord honored Rachel's desire to celebrate her brother by helping me be in the right place at the right time to buy the present she wanted. And Josh is wearing it today for Seahawks Friday and will probably wear it during the Super Bowl on Sunday.
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