My left hand has had a trigger thumb for well over 5 months. Many times, I asked the Lord to please heal it so I could bypass the cost of getting it fixed. However, it looks as though the Lord wanted me to get help. So, after talking with a doctor friend from church, I saw an orthopedic doctor today, and received an injection.

Though miracles still occur, God uses them sparingly. Even in Scripture, miracles were not God’s standard operating procedure. Many people assume the Bible is packed with miracles, but it isn’t. Only during certain periods in biblical history were there clustering’s of signs and wonders—during the Exodus, during the ministries of Elijah and Elisha, during the life of Christ and the early days of the Apostles. Throughout most of the Bible, God helped His people in ordinary, providential ways rather than in overtly supernatural ones.

The same is true today. That’s why mature Christians pay special attention to the accidents, misfortunes, and coincidences that befall them. For in reality, there are no such things. Only the providential ordering of a God who watches over His prayerful trusting children, and whose unseen hand is guiding, guarding, arranging, and rearranging circumstances.

Robert J. Morgan, The Red Sea Rules

In 2006, we moved to a small town in North Carolina leaving our son who was in his early twenties behind. Being a pastor’s family, we had moved repeatedly, but this was our first move where we left a child behind. As a mother, it was devastating to say the least. But by Christmas break of 2007, he had found an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia where one of his sisters was attending Liberty University. Delighted that he would be so much closer to us, my husband and I, along with our other daughter, traveled to Chattanooga, Tennessee and loaded him up in a borrowed van along with our minivan packed to the gills. However, when we made it back to our home –just 3 hours from Lynchburg, and our son contacted the apartment complex where he would be living, he was told the apartment was no longer available. He needed another place to live! At that moment I had a choice –to freak out like I normally would or –to cry out to God for help! I turned to the Lord in fervent prayer! We did not have the option of waiting another day! We were due in Lynchburg that day and he needed a place to live! While I prayed, my son and husband started making phone call after phone call inquiring about apartments. Through Liberty University’s website, my son found a room for rent in a house turned into a dormitory. The house had previously been for girls but was being turned into a boy’s living quarters. The owner of the place lived in Atlanta, but he just happened to be in Lynchburg that day. If we left our home and drove that day, the owner would wait to talk with us about renting the room. Come to find out, the owner’s name was Nathan. That is our son’s name! The name of the owner’s wife was Jennifer. That is our youngest daughter’s name! When we arrived, we were thrilled to see how the Lord had that place waiting for our son. As we began unloading, we met a girl on the Third floor, who was packing to move out. As we struck up a conversation with her, it became unambiguously clear that the Lord’s hand was in everything that day. You see, that girl, moving out of the house where we were moving our son into, was the daughter of a seminary student that my husband had attended seminary with in Winona Lake, Indiana. Through our years of seminary, we became friends, and a couple years after seminary we returned to visit these dear friends. We each had young children at that time and as we stood at their front door, they informed us their children had the chicken pox. That little girl was the very one who our son contracted chicken pox from so many years earlier!

Robert J. Morgan, in his little book, included the following statement by Charles Spurgeon:

“We believe in the providence of God, but we do not believe half enough in it.”

Ignorance of Providence is the greatest of all miseries, and the knowledge of it the highest happiness.

-John Calvin