So today started out like any normal day, laundry, dishes, kids etc... I decided to make Lasagna for dinner and had enough left to take to my parents tonight and visit for a little while! I had finished off the end of the two books I had been reading which have been amazing! "A Woman after God's Own Heart" by Elizabeth George and "The Power of a simple prayer" by Joyce Meyer. God has been doing so much in my life with these books I've decided from reading "A woman after God's own heart" to study more on the Holy Spirit, and Prayer. I believe in the power of prayer SO much however my prayer life has never been where I want it to be. I hear all these people spending hours in prayer and mine last for 5-10 minutes. Am I just not spiritual enough, do I just not know how to pray correctly? So I decided to learn more about it and just ask God to show me how he wants me to pray. One of the biggest frustrations I've had is praying in the Spirit, which will go hand in hand with my Holy Spirit study. For the last 4 years I have prayed and asked the Lord to be able to pray in the spirit, and what I thought was the gift of praying in tongues, was never received. At times I felt like it was coming but never actually fully happened. So while reading "The power of a simple prayer" I discovered that praying in the spirit was not just praying in a prayer language. It could be as "simple" as just waiting on the Lord to lay something on your heart to pray. As simple as not praying for me and my family and the things going on all the time but to listen to the spirit and pray for softened hearts, joy, the leading to do God's will. Allowing the spirit to lead you to pray for the hearts to change and not just the situations.
My husband Nathan was at one time going to school to be a Lawyer to fight for Christian rights, he is totally the smartest man I know, and would have been a fantastic Lawyer and still could be. However, after he was halfway through before deciding to go to Law school, God showed him that "it's the heart of men that need to change, not the laws." After that he decided to go into ministry and follow God's calling on his life to "change the hearts of man." The first place someone aims for if they are trying to kill someone is the heart, and that should be the first place we aim for in prayer when trying to change situations in our lives or trying to stop bad things from happening.
So after dinner I packed up the kids, and headed out to my parents house. I got to the stop light and realized I had forgotten the book I was going to bring her so turned around and headed back. I was going around the curve down the road from our house and as I hit the middle of the curve I see a police car coming straight towards me head on in my lane! I started to brake and at the last second she looked up from whatever she was doing and corrected herself before almost hitting me head on! A little shaken I continued home to get the book, got back in the car and headed to my parents house. On the way there the road started to merge from 2 lanes to 1 and I decided to pass the car in front of me before that happened. I got in the left lane and started to go a little faster, and so did the other car, and a little faster and so did the other car, then when I got next to the car he tried to run me off the road and jumped in front of me!
I made it safely to my parents house, and headed home around 9:10. Called my husband at church he said he was locking up the church and heading home too so he should be there before me, and while we were talking the phone went dead. I got home and he wasn't there yet, nor would he answer his phone. So being the crazy night it was I decided to just drive past the church and make sure he was okay. I pulled out of the driveway and two houses down from me saw a figure running down the hill towards my car, and then a 12 year old boy with no shirt on threw himself on the ground right in front of my car!! I braked and he looked up at me and go up and ran off. My first thought was to call the cops, what is a 12 year old kid doing throwing himself shirtless in front of cars at 9:30 at night! But I didn't I just thought I'll wait and check things out when I got back I'd only be gone 5 minutes or so.
I pulled around the corner and saw two black dogs running in the middle of the street, slowed down waited for them to pass so I didn't hit them and kept going. After I got to the church and realized Nathan wasn't there I went back home but this time, I got to the spot where the dogs had been running and saw something black laying in the middle of the road. As I came up on it I realized it was a black lab, and she had been hit pretty badly. Now I'm not usually an animal person, if I see an animal in the street who has been hit and is already dead I'd more than likely keep going. However as I slowed down and got close to her, I realized she was still alive. I stopped the car and turned around to shine the headlights on her, called 911 (which was bound to happen at some point tonight) and asked for help. As I got out of the car, I saw her panting heavily, struggling to stay alive. Two kids came running up to me saying they saw what happened! They said a guy in a huge truck hit her really hard and kept going! I saw she had tags but I wasn't sure weather to look at them and see if there was a number for the owner, I was afraid to touch her, didn't know if I would cause more pain and she would bite me or if I should just let her be. So I decided since I'm not great with animals anyways to let her be.
Nathan showed up behind my car, and got out to help. We directed traffic around her until help got there but people seemed like they didn't' care that there was blood everywhere and the dog was fighting for her life, they just wanted to get by as quick as possible even if that meant hitting her again (which we kept from happening but seemed pretty close at times).
Once the police got there so did her owners, by that time her breathing was so shallow I had to get pretty close to her to tell if she was still alive. The lady was sobbing and so upset like it was a child who had been hit. We gathered up what we could find in Nathan & Is cars and gave them some towels to get her in their car and to the emergency vets office. Whether she made it or not I don't know, and probably will never know, but I sure do hope so!
The thing that struck me so hard about this was she was hurting so bad, barely breathing but yet she didn't cry out, she wasn't whimpering, she just layed there like she trusted that help was on the way. It made me think of many times have I been hurting feeling like I've been hit hard by life and all I can do is cry out, all I can do is whimper about my situation or problems or how much we've been through the last few years, when if only I'd just "be still and KNOW...he is God!" and that my help is on the way even if it's down to the last second, and things are not looking good, or working out the way I wanted, if I just take my eyes off the situation and concentrate on my heart, God will be there to rescue me and help me make it through.
Now the one regret I did have in the situation is while I was standing there watching this woman sobbing over the dog and petting her telling her everything is going to be okay, I thought to myself "what can I do to help her?" and I thought "I need to just start praying for the dog!" then I started to think "but it's a dog!" After everything was all finished and done and we were back home Nathan & I both said the same thing about we should have prayed for the dog! What I didn't remember at the time is even though it was a dog, it's still a creation of God, and God can do anything and could have healed that dog right there in the street if only I was obedient and prayed over this dog like I felt I should have! But instead I let my thoughts and insecurities get the best of me and I didn't do it. I did pray for her once I got home and also know that now I need to pray for more boldness so that when the spirit lays something on my heart to pray for I do what I'm suppose to weather it's a dog, a cat, a mouse, or a person!
Someone once told me a story of a woman who was driving down the road and God spoke to her and told her to into that 7-11 and go back to the drinking fountains and stand on her head. The woman drove past the 7-11 but couldn't get that out of her mind, so feeling crazy she turned around went to the 7-11 walked back to the drinking fountains and stood on her head. When she was done she walked past the clerk and tried getting out the door asap! However the clerk yelled for her "ma am!! MA AM! I need to know why you just did that!!!" She turned to him and said "because God told me to!" The man broke down and started crying, he began telling her that minutes earlier he had a gun to his head, and was about to pull the trigger because he just didn't think that God existed anymore. He had so many things going wrong in his life that he just felt like God didn't care about him, so he said "God, if you exist and care about me, send someone in here to stand on their head by the drink fountain!"
So again we never know why we are in that place at that time, or what our prayers for a dog or a person's heart will change. God still does miracles every day, and I'm still praying tonight that that dog will get her miracle!
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