Waging war on procrastination here, this month – by each day tackling one procrastinated task, or one task likely to get put off.

Friday it was bake a pecan pie for my neighbors who drive me places.

They were refusing gas money, but when Mr. Neighbor learned I make that recipe, he said (grinning big) that’s something I could do in return.

At the time they’d just bought one from a bakery. So I waited.

I knew I could easily wait too long, maybe never get around to it… you know what I mean…

So, Friday I prepared the basic dough, then called to see if they’d be home before I did the rest.

He answered. We talked, and when he learned the reason for my call, his demeanor changed so strikingly I could almost see his face light up through the telephone!

“That,” he said, “is the best news I’ve gotten all day!” It was, in fact, the only good news he’d gotten amid a barrage of bad – I mean real wring-your-hands stuff. 

Really, that simple pie turned his day around. And next day, too. When he got that thing, he looked like a kid set loose with money in a candy store.

A pecan pie (clearly one of his comfort foods) gave him hope. So what a delight for me: to see that such a tame, domestic endeavor could have such uplifting impact!

But it wasn’t really the pie.

It was the timing. Right at the highest point of his day-long-building stress, someone called to ask, was this a good time to make him a pecan pie?

And that was either “just a coincidence” (again!), or all about God’s intervening love.

That little event reminds me how coincidences of timing have showed me God’s fingerprints – time after time.

Like money I needed showing up exactly when I most desperately needed it: that month when trusting God had ended me up with purse and gas tank empty. Without the desperation and the eleventh hour deliverance, I wouldn’t have been so strongly impressed that this was God’s doings and none other.

Like when Husband, sticking his toe in the water of what he thought was God’s call to a missions trip, sent off the $300 deposit in the morning, and by evening found in the mail the inexplicable check from that impersonal clinic – for exactly… you guessed it, $300.

Other examples:

God’s preparation for my mother’s unexpected death

The provision of rides from these very neighbors, just before I learned my vision would no longer allow me big highway driving.

And more… and more…

Yes, God is in the timing, and the more such “coincidences” of timing we experience, the more we see His fingerprints. We just need to have the faith to trust in Him and await His timing, giving Him the chance to execute it, and ourselves the chance to see the glorious beauty of His involvement in our little lives.

Thanking God this morning for…

 ~pecan pies (yum!)

 ~ability to make them

 ~ingredients at hand

 ~that this last one came out just right

~the nifty gifty rolling mat (I love to use) from a dear friend

~the French rolling pin Husband made of cherry wood from a tree right here on this property. I love its simple beauty, and how it handles – never use any other kind anymore

~and above all, for God’s special blessings of “coincidental” timing.

*****

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