This morning I hauled myself out of bed and wandered out to the elliptical machine. My ipad was perched on top, where it has been for days. You see, that thing has a herculean battery. I use it to read as I exercise (clearly not very well) and if I leave it there, it will only lose a couple percentages a day in battery life. It was in the eighties yesterday. This morning, it was completely dead. I couldn't possibly ride that silly machine for twenty minutes without a book, so I irritably wandered upstairs to the library.
When we moved into this house, the old owners left a few books behind. I love books. I collect them and have since I was in junior high school. The library had plenty of room, so I never bothered to even go through the books to see if any of them were worth reading. I haven't had much time for reading lately. As I perused the collection, my eye fell on a book I had never noticed before, one left behind by the old owners. It said something about left-brained kids. At that moment, I heard one of the kids walking up the stairs and realized that I had to hurry if I was going to exercise before it was time to get them out the door to school. I grabbed the book and rushed downstairs.
I spent a few minutes programming the elliptical and getting into a rhythm, and then opened the book to the "forward." It was a description of the author going through a struggle with her son. Immediately, phrases started jumping off the page as each sentence contained the very keywords I had been searching on the internet. My breathing sped up as my movement on the elliptical slowed down. I felt tears forming in my eyes that I immediately wiped away so I could see the pages. I never finished my twenty minutes exercising. I sat on the floor and read my story through the eyes of a different mother.
One thing you have to understand about miracles is that they are never immediate. My child's struggle isn't going to go away because I read a book. No, the real miracle here isn't that I now have a magical formula to fix every problem in our home. The miracle is that Heavenly Father heard my prayer and took the time to speak back. Do you know what he said? He told me, "I love you. I hear you. And I want you to know that I love that child as much as you do. We'll help him together."
And miracles like that happen ALL the time.
