Mercy in the Mundane

I fully intended to write a post about yesterday – yesterday. And I fully intended to write a post about today – today. But it looks like yesterday’s post will be written today, and today’s post will be written tomorrow. 

Yesterday was a day full of God’s guidance and provision. Sometimes guidance is best seen in the little things – those things that come to fruition in a short amount of time, and there isn’t much opportunity to wonder why things happened the way they did. That doesn’t mean that little things have more guidance; it just means it’s more obvious. 

Little things happened all day yesterday. First, we woke up late – which never happens, especially out here where everything is two hours earlier than we’re used to. We had been planning on visiting the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest, but 3 hours one-way seemed a little bit much. (Even for overambitious souls like ourselves.) So we decided to stay in the Grand Canyon National Park area for the day.

Secondly, we decided to take the free shuttle bus to different lookout points farther out on the south rim. This bus line had been closed when we tried to get on it for the past few days, due to nearby lightening storms. But yesterday it was open, so naturally we visited all nine points.

Thirdly, around the third-to-last point, I started feeling sick. I don’t do well in intense light or high heat, so I was feeling faint. I had black spots encroaching on the corners of my field of vision. I had to get back on the bus right away and head back.

Fourthly, I felt better after we got on the bus, so we saw the remaining two points. When I started feeling weird again, we left.

And then everything became apparent. There were nasty lightening storms where we would have been had we gone with our original plan. So they closed and evacuated the entire West Rim, which we had just been seeing. My sickness let us see absolutely everything we wanted to, before it got dangerous to be out there.

Then it rained. It was the first big rain of the monsoon season, complete with fantastic lightening and even more impressive thunder. And we were safe, all because we had woken up a little late, and I had felt sick.

It doesn’t sound so wonderful when it’s typed out in cold, black-and-white letters, but we nonetheless saw the kindness of God very clearly yesterday, in the little things. In uncomfortable situations. In the orchestration of a day so perfect we could never have planned it that way ourselves.