This week I shared some more money miracles. Some were just “little” miracles. Three times strangers just handed money to one of my sons, each time the same son. One of the times was his birthday and it paid for the whole celebration. During this time we were living without income. We had left our agency and regular support. You can read that story here.
Another time on the way to buy bread for breakfast, we found a coin on the street which was going to enable us to buy as much as usual. Then the seller threw in extra for the kids. We thought we were lacking, but God turned our lack into an abundance.
Twice we received checks in the mail unexpectedly when we had a big expense. Most recently, just a couple of years ago, we had a big dental bill and over a thousand dollars came in a check from a German bank saying that we had overpaid our heating bill. We hadn’t been in Germany for more than a year and a half.
Once, while we were living in Turkey, we needed $40,000 to renew our visas because of a change in the laws there. (It was supposed to prove we could afford to live there. We didn’t need to have that much in order to live there because we had money coming in from my husband teaching languages online to homeschoolers.) We didn’t have the money. If God wanted us there, He was going to have to figure it out.
At the time we were living in the middle of a school for Syrian refugees, literally. The apartments above and below us had emptied out at the same time and we scooped up out. Within a day or two we got a phone call. It was a friend who had been kicked out of the country. We asked where she was; she said outside. She had gotten back in, bravely showing up at the airport and getting detained and questioned, but they ended up letting her back in. She was with a Syria pastor who was heading a little school for Syrian refugee children. The landlord where they had been kicked them out and they were looking for a new place. We had one. They grew into both apartments and eventually into ours when we left.
While in the middle of all this work for Syrian refugees, we one day met Joseph who was helping getting money to a town in Syria that had been cut off because of the war. One of the Syrians was going to take the money over the border. The problem was that they needed to transfer the money from his organization’s European bank to Turkey to get the money. The Syrians couldn’t have bank accounts, so he asked us if we had one. We did. He asked if he could send $40,000 to us. (I wasn’t sure telling the story online if it had been dollars. My husband says it was dollars and it was the exact amount like that.) We told him how we needed $40,000 and asked if we could use his money to prove we had money in the bank. He was happy it was going to work out so well! We got the money, got a bank statement, took it all out and gave it to the Syrian christian to go help his home town.
Another story I shared was how a Turkish official at the government hospital worked to get us Turkish insurance to pay for our son’s entire two-month stay in the NICU. We never paid anything that whole time. His heart was moved to help us. We certainly didn’t ask if that could happen. He said no foreigner had ever received Turkish insurance before. And he got it started retroactively to cover from the day before he was born. No one knew how to do it, but he called in favors, pulled strings, and had the grace of God on him.
The final story I told this week was of the time my husband’s ATM card got eaten by an ATM machine. The bank who owned the machine said they wouldn’t help. That card was our only access to our money in America. We called the bank in America and the man said they would overnight a card to us. That was that. Simple. The next day it didn’t arrive. We figured it was because it was a Turkish holiday and they weren’t working, but it was really important to us, so my husband called our American bank and asked about the card being sent. He was told that they couldn’t have sent a card. They were not allowed to. We got transferred to the manager. We tried to explain. He explained that they couldn’t send a card. It was impossible. We would have to physically come in to get it. We explained that we weren’t asking for a card to be sent. We thought it already was. We were just wanting to check on it. He looked at our account and there was a note that it had been sent DHL overnight express. He was angry. He asked who we spoke to. It was Dale the best my husband could remember. There was no one who worked there by that name. He was mad, and my husband just excused himself from the conversation. The card arrived the next day. If it hadn’t happened to be the day before a holiday, we never would have known a miracle had occurred. It would have just seemed normal. God gave us a little glimpse of what He does for us, when we might have never even realized it.
Look for the miracles in every day. God is always working for your good. God is always loving you, so you never need to worry about what He’s up to. Rejoice, give thanks in all circumstances. God is a loving Father who takes care of His children. The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous, but the house of the one who builds his house on the Rock stands. Matthew 7:24-27