Tiny Provisions

Peace family, do you ever feel like God doesn’t care about the small details of your lives?

I just want to encourage you today with a sort of silly story that was still meaningful to me. Over the weekend, I went on a women’s retreat, where I lost a pearl earring. I really hate losing things, but I especially felt bad about this earring; it was one from a pink river pearl set that my mom gave me around the time when I first started college, and it has a matching necklace. Pearls also have a special meaning for me; they remind me how God takes my pain and makes something beautiful, just like an oyster will naturally make one of these gorgeous gem-like drops as a result of a painful piece of grit getting inside the shell. The oyster doesn’t give in to its pain and be consumed by it. Instead, the oyster takes that pain and makes something valuable, admirable, and beautiful.

When some of the other ladies found out that I had lost my earring, they immediately said, “Pray about it! God will help you find it!” I had already said a little prayer, so I prayed again, but I worried that it had fallen off somewhere on the grounds when I took a walk with a good friend that first afternoon. I thought about it all weekend, and continued to search, even retracing my steps, but I never found it, and I felt a little disappointed when I left the retreat center, feeling like it was lost forever.

I thought to myself about how it wasn’t that big of a deal. Even though the earring had been special to me, maybe God wanted someone else to find it sometime in the future on some day when they needed some extra encouragement. I stopped thinking about it, and work was so busy this week that I never unpacked my bag until last night. Guess what? I found that earring tucked up deep inside of my toiletry bag! I have no idea how it got there, but I remembered the ladies’ confident assurance that “God will help you find it!” and it made me smile.

Now, sometimes we do just have to let go of things, because sometimes God’s answer is, “Well, I do care about you, but it’s an earring and you don’t need to worry about that anymore,” but sometimes he says, “Look! I care about you. You don’t need this earring back to be happy, but  here it is, just the same.”

Peace family, if you need something today, keep praying for it! Even if God doesn’t answer quite at the time or in quite the way that you feel would be best, he does hear you, and he is with you, and he is good.