The Bald Goat

The winter months of a lawn care worker is not spent mowing as much as cleaning…lots of leaves. Hours are spent every day blowing leaves, mulching leaves and bagging leaves. I never knew how much time and energy went into making a yard and landscaping look beautiful during the winter months! I now have a greater appreciation for a well maintained yard and also for those who perform this job.

Needless to say this job can get pretty mind numbing as you clean the same properties over and over again. There is a lot of time to think. I listen to lots of audiobooks…as many as 2 a day if they are short! Other times I will listen to music and allow my mind to drift…especially if there is a lot on my mind.

That is where my mind was one day while blowing leaves. I was really getting stressed about money. Our family has been going through a transition that has been rough to say the least. There is a definite light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel seems so long!

My heart was heavy.

I was blowing leaves across a parking lot at a bank. Not just leaves, but trash and acorns and whatever. And then I saw it…in the pile of leaves:

A dollar.

What a pleasant surprise! I stuck it in my pocket to buy a special treat at a convenience store later that day. A couple days later, I was blowing leaves again at another property.

And found another dollar!

This hadn’t happened before and now it happened twice in one week! I began to wonder where this “dollar tree” was at that was dropping it’s “leaves” on the ground! But a different thought filled my mind.

“I will take care of you.”

It was odd. It was as if my mind was connecting some dots that did not seem to line up, but there they were making a picture I couldn’t explain. A story came into my head from Matthew 27:24-26. Jesus needed to pay the temple tax so he sent Peter fishing, literally, and had him open the mouth of the fish to find a coin in order to pay the temple tax!

Now that is just a strange story!

But it is not really about money, and neither was the message I got from the dollars in the leaves. I was not getting a message saying God would mysteriously create money from nothing so that my family could pay the bills. Or that I should start searching every pile of leaves because this was the source of all financial security. Peter did not continue to fish for bass with an affinity for eating drachmas.

This was a message, not a solution.

And God made this message very clear in my heart. “I will take care of you…trust me.”

Trust.

God has been faithful and will continue to be faithful even when my trust seems to fade. He loves me and knows how hard this can be. And when I was low he sent me a message in a pile of leaves:

a single dollar

Not a winning lottery ticket, a dollar.

Because it was not about finances. It was about trust and love, and protection, and faithfulness, and God being right there with me through all this and caring enough to wrap his arms around me and say, “I will take care of you.”

Lord, help me to trust you. Hold me up because I feel like I am going to fall sometimes under the weight of all these burdens I continue to carry. I carry them because I don’t know how to put them down. I feel as if you have more to tell me about all this. 

I do believe. Help me overcome my unbelief. - Mark 9:24