2017 - A Year of Miracles

"And now, O all ye that have imagined up unto yourselves a god who can do no miracles, I would ask of you, have all these things passed, of which I have spoken? Has the end come yet? Behold I say unto you, Nay; and God has not ceased to be a God of miracles."  Mormon 9:15

Some may say that what we see as miracles are just coincidences - but I believe in miracles.  I believe in a loving Heavenly Father that watches out for us and allows things to happen for our good.  We are only three days into a new year and I have seen miracles.

MIRACLE #1:
Just before we left to go to Omaha, we were having problems with getting heat in our van.  We discovered that the antifreeze was empty... so we filled it.  Everything seemed fine.  We drove it to Great Falls and left it at the airport for a week while we were gone.  When we returned on the 1st, we could smell a bit of antifreeze when we drove to the hotel, but didn't think too much of it.

Unfortunately, as we got on our way the next day, the heat started to give out again.  We'd already left Great Falls and didn't have anything with us that would be of use and none of us had super warm clothing either (oops).  We made it to Conrad, MT and stopped at a gas station, bought a couple jugs of antifreeze and some Stop Leak - added it to the radiator and kept going.  By the time we stopped at the border, we could really smell the antifreeze and knew that something serious was going on.

We made it home and when we checked the antifreeze levels... it was empty again.  Thankfully, my parents are amazing, talented, patient people and they allowed us to come right out!  My dad took one look at it and quickly discovered a large crack in the Y connector where the hoses attach.  He just shook his head and was amazed that we made it home and that we hadn't fried our engine in the process!

We had to leave the van there for them to get parts, but they were easily ordered in from Lethbridge and installed today.

MIRACLE #2:
Before we left, our furnace had quit working.  Lennard had got it going again, but we called the company in Lethbridge to come do a service call anyways.  Almost $400 later - they said it all looked good.  We left for Omaha at ease, knowing that the furnace was good and that my parents would be watching the house for us.  It snowed like crazy while we were gone, and my parents had the herculean task of clearing out our driveway.  We arrived home on the 2nd and early the next morning - the furnace went out.  Really?!  What are the chances that the first night we got home there would be issues?  I can imagine what a mess we would have come home to if it had happened while we were gone!  While it's frustrating to have issues with the furnace again, we feel truly blessed to be here when it happened so that we could deal with it and not have frozen pipes, etc.

MIRACLE #3:
With the crazy amounts of snow we've got this year, and knowing that we were going to have to drive down to Great Falls, we decided that we needed to get winter tires for our van.  We have only ever had All Season tires, but we both kept feeling like it would be a good idea to do winter tires.  Lennard popped down to Kirk's Tires a few days before Christmas and got the last four tires that Tom had in stock.  The total for the tires was WAY more than I was expecting and we weren't sure how we were going to pay for them (other than just putting more debt onto our line of credit), but we still felt that we needed to move forward.  Just a day later, Lennard was talking with WCB about his wrist and was told that they would be compensating him for some of the mileage for all the appointments he's had to go on.  While not happy about his wrist being broken, we were glad that something good could come from it and looked forward to getting a little bit of money to help cover costs.  When we received the cheque yesterday, I was shocked to see that it was almost the amount we need to pay for the tires.  Truly amazing.

I choose to look on these events as miracles.  I know that even though we are struggling with a few things right now, we can have faith that miracles have not ceased.  I plan to look on this year as our year of miracles because I know that the Lord is directing our lives in ways that we can't even imagine.  We may not understand why things happen, but we do know that someday we will understand the reason.