provision

I've often thought that God has a funny sense of humor when it comes to provision.  To be honest, I don't actually find it all that funny.

While in seminary, my wife worked at a church while I was a student full-time.  Every once in a while, a gift of support would come our way.  Sometimes it would be a check, sometimes someone would pay our rent for a month or two.  Almost always it was anonymous.  But after the third gift, I began to notice a pattern.

Within a few days or a week of receiving the gift, something would happen.  Something like the hydraulic tensioner (it's the thing that uses hydraulics to keep tension on the timing belt on a car engine) breaking, thus causing the engine to, well, break.  In nearly every circumstance, the gift we received was within a few dollars of the something that then happened.

It got to the point that I would start wondering when the other shoe was going to fall every time someone would send us a support check.  I mean, as much as I appreciated the provision that God was providing, I was actually pretty happy with the engine I'd had in the car and would have preferred that it not break at all...

Well, that was several years ago (wow... 6, to be exact.  Time flies...).  But something happened this past week that reminded me of that incident.  We returned from two weeks of vacation to a very warm house - our air conditioning was not working.  I couldn't get it to start.  Since it was a Sunday, and the next day was Labor Day, I decided we'd sweat it out until Tuesday when I could make a service call and not pay emergency, holiday rates.

Turns out pretty much our entire air conditioning system is hosed.  Sweet.  And the estimate of the repair is, well, a lot of money.

Now, we never received our federal tax return, which was supposedly mailed in early June.  After signing off on the estimate for the A/C work, I filled out the form to request a new tax return check be issued.  I "happened" to look at the amount of the return.  

$30 more than the cost of the A/C repair.

Still not laughing.