Text Message: Please PRAY!

I opened a text on Friday afternoon from my friend Liz who was attending the final day of a conference: "Upset stomach.  Need to fly home at 4.  Please PRAY!"  There is only one thing worse than having an upset stomach, and that is having to fly with an upset stomach.  I began to pray for God to help her navigate through the next few hours.  She stowed away a plastic grocery bag in her purse.  And she spent her waiting time, not at the gate, but in the airport bathroom, afraid that she was going to have to cancel her flight.

She was flying Southwest Airlines, and so, an assigned seat was not waiting for her.  But then again, perhaps it was.  Boarding the plane, she headed down the aisle through the crowd, searching for the first available window seat, hoping to somehow sleep through the flight.  About midpoint behind the exit row, she spotted a vacant window seat over the left wing.  She was eager to close her eyes to block out her tsunamic waves of nausea.  But as she sat down, something caught her eye.  There, tucked in the seat pocket directly in front of her, was an entire unopened sleeve of saltine crackers.  JUST what she needed.  JUST when she needed it. Her husband glanced over.  "Where did you get those?" he asked, incredulous.

She munched her way through the flight, her stomach now calmed.  God provided not a single crumpled-up cellophane packet of crackers discarded from someone's lunch, but He lavished her with even more than she needed -- in a way she could not have imagined -- in a way that only God could have engineered.  Unassigned seat?  I don't think so.  God had those crackers waiting.

Later she texted me:  "I just wanted to make it through the flight.  It was the sweetest gift ever."

After she arrived home, she messaged me, "He knew I would need that now.  He precedes our days and needs."

This morning, I asked her permission to relate this story of God's provision and to verify some of the details.  About an hour or two later,  she texted back:  "Wait a minute.  I asked you to pray earlier that day."  Yes, I acknowledged.

"What if I hadn't asked for prayer?" she typed. 

If we had not prayed, would those crackers have been there anyway?  Maybe or maybe not.  But they appeared not a moment too late, nor a row away.  And because we prayed, we can recognize with delight Who put them there.

One of the names of God in the Old Testament is Jehovah Jireh, the God who provides.  My friend was passing through her own place of wilderness.  And when she cried "Help!"  God had already worked out the details.   He was there.  As they say in the Jimmy John's commercial:  "Freaky Fast Delivery."  Before she even knew to ask, God delivered  His bounty to the seat pocket directly in front of her.  Nothing random in that.

And I wonder if the person who sat on an earlier flight in that seat -- who left their crackers behind -- has any idea how he or she was used by God to bless a sick woman in desperate need.   How clueless we are to His great designs and how He uses us in them.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are My ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
                           Isaiah 55.9