THE MIRACULOUS IS THERE FOR THE ASKING WHEN WE DO GOD'S WILL AND FOLLOW 'SIGNS'

[adapted from The God of Miracles]

Remember when Jesus  told His followers to go to the sea, throw in a hook, and take up the first fish they caught? When they opened its mouth, He told them, there would be a coin (Matthew 17:27), a shekel, and there was. It was a sign that He had orchestrated, as He also orchestrates them for us. The more we meditate on what God already has done for us, the more He sends.

Remember in prayer to savor past times God has helped you. Love Him for it repeatedly. Recall every detail. Give thanks all over again!

And with faith, keep the cycle going. Make your life a flow of miracles. Jesus I trust in You. Jesus I trust in You.

The miraculous is there for the asking. There are exceptions. There are those trials of life.

But God loves to operate in the realm of "luck."

If you think back over your life, you’ll be hit with a steady stream of lucky incidents – events that changed your life. That's where we see God working many of His miracles. As one sage suggested, coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous, and the dictionary tells us that coincidence is "a sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged" – which is correct, of course, about the events being “arranged,” but wrong about them being "accidental."

Take a choir in Nebraska.

One day every member ended up late for practice, each for a different reason. Good thing: three minutes before the meeting was scheduled to start, a gas explosion destroyed the church. Or take a woman named Manon Shockey (of Falls Church, Virginia). Her daughter needed a new house, and even though it wasn't for sale, something made Manon stop and pray in front of a "perfect" white home in the area. A couple days later her daughter called with the news that the house was suddenly for sale!

There is the house that becomes available when we are looking for a house or the mailman who shows up with a letter from a friend who is on your mind or the person on the street who just happens to know the location of the out-of-the-way place you’re looking for.

One of the more astonishing cases was that of a man from the state of Washington who was in the music ministry – and thinking of quitting. On the road and staying overnight in Dayton, Ohio, he was walking up a strange street looking to buy a Pepsi when he passed a payphone that started ringing, at the very moment.

At first startled, then hesitant, he decided to pick it up and found an operator making a person-to-person call – to him. She was asking for someone by his name! So ridiculously unlikely and out of the blue was this that he thought it was a practical joke (perhaps Candid Camera).

It was not. The operator was putting through a call from an emotionally distraught woman who had once seen him on TV, was now contemplating suicide, and had been desperately praying to find him. She explained that the phone number flashed into her mind in a vision.

"Coincidentally," it was the correct number, and she changed her mind after talking to him.

"What are the odds of that?" he asked. "A billion to one?"

Perhaps a bit more than that.

Anyway, she lived and he stayed in ministry.