Magic of God Moments

Do you notice the Magic of God moments when they are happening? Or perhaps you have a measurement of how big something has to be before it qualifies as the Magic of God? 
 
I used to feel that to call something the Magic of God, meant that it had to be BIG – like one of those stories you read about in the newspaper where a stranger finds superhuman strength and lifts a car off of an injured person following an accident. 

​However, in recent years, I have discovered that the Magic of God is happening all the time, everywhere. The catch is that I have to be paying attention or the moment slips past without me noticing what has happened.  As more and more people are doing nowadays, I am practising being consciously present. To me being consciously present means that the mind is doing the same activity that the body is doing. Like most things, it does require practice in order to improve, so I try to practise this whenever I can. When I am consciously present, there is a stillness and a depth of quality in whatever I’m doing and it is so much easier to observe the Magic of God at play.  
 
***
I’m currently on a holiday in Montana, where I grew up. I’m staying at the family cabin that is about an hour’s drive away from where my brother lives. Last weekend, my sister-in-law was having a big yard / garage sale. I offered to go over and help her. She is, let’s say, a ‘collector’. But even she was surprised about how much stuff she had that she wanted to sell. 
 
So when I arrived, I asked what I could do. She gave me a few jobs, one of which was to open up some of the unpacked boxes and group the stuff on tabletops. Some boxes were easy because they contained all bed linen, or all kitchen utensils. There was one box I opened that appeared to be a fairly random collection of things so I closed it back up and went to another. 
 
While I was doing this, I suddenly thought of a crocheted doily that my mother used to have on her dining room table. The doily was made by my aunt. One time when I was back home, my cousin was visiting – the daughter of the aunt who had crocheted the doily - and she saw it on my mother’s table and told me that she would really like to have it because she didn’t have anything of her mother’s. I particularly wanted to give this doily to her because due to difficult life circumstances and a fair dose of ‘bad luck’, it was true that she didn’t have anything left to remind her of her mother. So I spoke to my mother about it but to my surprise, she said, “But I really like it, and she made it for me, so no I don’t want to give it away.” Well, ok, that was that, it wasn’t mine to give away. 
 
Then several years later my mother, quite elderly by now, got sick and was hospitalized.  We realized when it was time for her to come home from the hospital that she wouldn’t be able to live by herself any longer.  This was quite a chaotic time for everyone as I lived too far away and was working so couldn’t just drop everything and get there to help facilitate my mother’s move. Fortunately, my daughter did live near by (well, at least in the same country!) and was able to make arrangements to go settle my mother into a temporary nursing home and to also pack up her house and get it ready to be tenanted.  Things were given to Goodwill and other things went here and there. As I said, it was a chaotic time.  
 
Shortly after this I remembered the butterfly doily but no one particularly remembered it and consequently no one knew where it had ended up, I assumed at Goodwill. I felt very badly about this and apologized to my cousin and that was the end of it.
 
***
 
So that day of the yard sale, I could see a few things of my mother’s which is perhaps what triggered my memory of the butterfly doily. I asked my sister-in-law if she remembered it or if she had ever come across it. No, she had no idea what I was talking about. 
 
The weather was perfect and she had a good turnout for the yard sale, so we were busy, pricing, selling and making conversation with the customers. In between, I kept feeling this pull to go back to the box of random goods.
 
I went back and unpacked a few things from the box of random goods. While I was doing that, I told my sister-in-law the story that explained why I was suddenly asking about this piece of old handiwork. 
 
I again mentioned the doily and she said, “Well, it wouldn’t be in there. That isn’t any of your mother’s stuff.” 
 
I replied, “No, I can see this box isn’t my mother’s things. I just would really love  to find that doily for my cousin.”
 
So I suppose you can see the ending to this story by now. There, in the bottom of this box of random stuff was the butterfly doily and the matching little end table doilies. Now how they got in the bottom of that box we will never know. 
 
But I how I found them there is easy – it was a Magic of God Moment. This was a true instant of AMAZEMENT for me. I could hardly believe my eyes when I came across it. 
 
That afternoon, driving back to the cabin, I was recalling how the minute I opened that box, the butterfly doily came to mind and as I walked away from the box, I asked my sister-in-law if she remembered it. How was it then that as I went about helping with the garage sale, I kept being pulled back to that box? It would have been so easy to ignore that box as there were many, many boxes that needed unpacking and there wasn’t any more table space to display things on, so why did I keep going back to that box? Yes, I was guided to find it by the Magic of God.
 
PS I’ve let my cousin know that I’ve found the butterfly doily and that I’ll be posting it to her the next time I go to town.  Needless to say, she is very happy.  
 
 
 

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