God’s Perfect Timing

Greeting, brothers and sisters in Christ.

This is an expansion of and continuation of the post A Sucker Born Every Minute. That post is suitable for the general public. But I have to put Part 2 in the private “Christians Only” section because unbelievers won’t understand. In fact, they wouldn’t believe it at all. But you Christ-centered Spirit filled Christians experience and witness miraculous things. You can rejoice with me for God’s amazing timing.

If you haven’t read that other post already, go read it, then return here.

Ok, now that you’ve read Part One, continue below.

I already told in the other post how the electricity almost got turned off, but I forgot to mention how the gas had already been turned off. That made for some miserable, cold showers.

I also told how I was getting produce scraps trying to keep all those animals fed, but there’s more to that story.

Produce alone wasn’t a sufficient diet for all those different kinds of animals; most of them needed something more substantial to go with it. So I started asking the stores if they had anything else, like damaged boxes, expired canned and packaged foods, or anything at all. They did have a little here and there they could add to the produce boxes.

Then one day while I was at one of the mom-and-pop stores getting the scraps, the owner, or maybe it was an employee, approached me and said they were going to be doing inventory and some reorganizing, and if I was interested, I could come to the loading dock on a certain day, and they would have some boxes of food for me. Of course I said yes, not really knowing what to expect.

I showed up at the appointed time, and wow! There were stacks and stacks of boxes on the loading dock, filled with all kinds of canned and packaged food. Some of it had reached the Best Buy date, but it was all perfectly good food.

My mother and I didn’t actually need much of it. She was well stocked up from grocery sales since before Charles died, and the pantry and freezer was full. That’s why she had periodically been able to help needy families, including the incident where she took a big load of groceries to the Taylors, like I told about in the post When God Speaks for the Hungry. We weren’t able to buy fresh foods like bread and milk, but we weren’t going hungry.

So here we were with this big load of food, and I just couldn’t bring myself to give perfectly good groceries to the animals. But my mother knew a couple of needy families, so we gave it to them.

It wasn’t long before that store was giving us extra good food pretty regularly. Then the other store that I was getting produce scraps from also started giving us boxes of canned and packaged foods. My mother called the church and asked if they knew more needy families, and we started taking groceries to several different ones.

Somehow word got around that we were feeding families, and various stores started calling us to come get food to give out! Sometimes we were getting enough at a time to fill up the van. We started getting more food than we had families to feed, so I contacted a nearby church pantry that was feeding a lot of people, and we started giving most of it to them, for which they were eternally grateful. Sometimes we’d have so much in the van, I would call them and they would come get it. They would just transfer it from my mother’s van to theirs, right in the driveway.

While all this was going on, Mr. Roberts came and got his animals, and my mother was getting her $427 a month Social Security check. Then I increased my small animal production when I found an additional buyer. All that was a help, but finances were still terrible. My mother needed her medicine, we needed to keep the electricity and water on, and we needed gas money for her medical appointments and to pick up and deliver groceries.

Before I begin the next segment of this post, I need to clarify a couple of things. You’ll soon understand why.

The prescriptions my mother was getting varied by quantity. A couple were prescribed as a 30 day supply, a couple of them for 60 days amounts, and one or two for 90 days. This means she didn’t get exactly the same meds every month, which in turn means the dollar amount needed varied each month. The monthly cost could range from a low of $275 or so, to a high of around $350.

These events happened almost 30 years ago, and I do not remember the exact amounts of the checks I’m going to tell about, so I’m going to make up some numbers to illustrate how it worked out.

One day, a hand addressed letter from another state came in the mail from a Mr. Anderson addressed to my mother. I didn’t know who that was. This was a few years before Emergency Services made the town get street names with numbers on the houses, so letters sent to the town via General Delivery went to the person whose name was on the envelope, and that’s how it was addressed.

I handed the letter to my mother, and she was very surprised, but she enlightened me about the man’s identity.

Several years before, Mr. Anderson had moved to this town. and he and my mother had met at church. They’d had lively conversations several times after church. Not what you would call friends, but they were good acquaintances. I wasn’t even living in this part of Texas at the time, so I never knew he existed until that first letter. He only lived here for a few months, then his job transferred him elsewhere.

My mother opened the envelope, which contained a hand written letter. When she unfolded it, a check made out to her name fell out. When she saw the amount of the check, her jaw just about hit the floor. It was for $296.31. Why a check, and why such an odd amount?

She read the letter, and Mr. Anderson explained how he had been praying in the Spirit, and he was strongly impressed to send that check in that particular amount to that particular woman he had met in church those few years before. It didn’t puzzle him that he needed to send money. He assumed something must be going on that she needed money. But he was as baffled by the odd amount God instructed him to send, as my mother was to receive it. He also explained that the Holy Spirit was impressing on him to send a check monthly until he was instructed otherwise.

My mother immediately sat down with pen and paper and wrote a letter in return to thank him, to praise God!, and to explain the financial situation, so he would know why she needed help.

A few days later, it was time to get her prescriptions filled for the month, and… did you guess? The total was $296.31! She told Mr. Anderson about that in her next letter. When he replied, he was relieved that the mystery of the strange amount was cleared up!

The next check was $311.72. The prescriptions totaled $311.72. Then $280.53. The prescriptions totaled $280.53. And it kept going like that. Month after month after month.

This was extraordinary.

Maybe it’s happened to you or someone you know. An unexpected expense comes up that must be paid by a certain date. You can’t raise the money no matter what you try. Then at the last minute, something totally off the wall happens and the money just kind of finds you. Sometimes your windfall is even to the penny of the amount you need. But that “to the penny” miracle is a one-off thing that happens once in a blue moon. For this to happen every month was simply incredible!

That went on for the longest time. Then one month the letter accompanying the check said that would be the last one. The Holy Spirit told Mr. Anderson it was time to stop.

My mother was able to write a letter in reply with good news. Social Security had refigured things and raised her check to almost $900 a month! Plus, Medicare started paying part of the medication costs. Mr. Anderson had sent the checks until they were no longer needed. God’s timing!

You may be wondering why God waited so long to tell Mr. Anderson to start sending the checks, when she badly needed them well before that first one. I wondered that also. Then it hit me. I know exactly why!

If an additional source of income had materialized from the beginning, whether via Mr. Anderson or another means, we would never have gone begging at the stores for food to feed that truckload of animals Mr. Roberts brought. Which means we would never have started our grocery ministry, which enabled us to help feed hundreds of people over a several year period.

God held back just long enough to let us get a well established food ministry going, then stepped in.

Remember Romans 8:28 – We know that in everything God works for good with those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose.

When everything in your life is going terribly wrong, stay faithful! God will use the bad to bring about good things. Sometimes it’s hard to see this, especially when you’re right in the middle of the bad situation. It could be months or years after the events to see the good that resulted. There may be times when you never do figure it out. But rest assured, if you remain obedient and steadfast, and keep Praising the Lord! through it all, your circumstances will turn around.

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