Divine Providence: St. Joseph Edition

I currently use Earthlink as my internet provider.  As you can no doubt tell by my lack of posts, this provider hasn’t been providing anything aside from agita for the last month.  I’m lucky to have internet for 3 minute stretches.  Most days I’m simply without.  Extremely frustrating, but not exactly the worst thing ever.

Anyway, I wanted to share a fun story of Divine Providence with you.

A few months ago, I ordered a few copies of my favorite St. Joseph book.  These last few months they’ve sat in a closet because I kept forgetting to bring them to their intended recipients (my mother and a priest friend… we’ll call him Fr. Happy Meal). 

Every time I’d go to my mother’s house, I’d think to myself, “Darn it, not again!  I left the books at home!”

Seriously… it was SO frustrating!  I felt so foolish every time I’d show up without the books that were sitting pointlessly on a shelf. 

Anyway, fast forward to last week.  I had a last minute meeting spring up and was unable to find a sitter.  I called my sister in Philly to see if she’d be able to swing by last minute to help out.  She could, so she came by to sit for Vince.

While she was there, I gave her the books because I was NOT going to forget them again!

She took them home and gave them to my mother.  I let my mom know that one was for her and one was for Fr. Happy Meal.  She assured me she’d pass along the book to him when she saw him next.

A few days later, I got a phone call from Fr. Happy Meal.  He was really happy to have received the book because he’d recently been looking for a new book to read.  His bookshelf is full of theology / spirituality books, but he was craving one on a saint – any saint.  He didn’t have any, though, and no real time to purchase any, so when the book on St. Joseph fell into his lap, it was a happy answer to his desire for such specific reading material.

I love stories like that.  God obviously knew St. Joseph would come knocking on Fr. Happy Meal’s heart in Lent, so He made sure to plant the idea of purchasing that book into my head.  He also made sure I forgot the book repeatedly until the timing was just right.  Then, when things were in order and Fr. Happy Meal felt the yearning for saintly reading material, He lined things up to make certain my sister would pick up the book from me (since He couldn’t trust I’d ever remember to bring it, myself – sorry, God!).  How cool is that?

Things like that are nice little reminders that God’s always thinking of us and laying down the path for us to follow.  Some people might chalk all this up to a crazy set of coincidences.  I feel lucky to be one of the “crazies” who not only sees, but feels, the Hand of God in these happy occurrences.