Real or Imagined

There is this old attraction from Epcot called “Cranium Command.” It was one of my favorites of those that have gone the way of the dodo. You got to go inside the human brain and see how the body systems work through the eyes of a rookie brain pilot named Buzzy. At one point in the show, the general makes a statement about how sometimes we work ourselves up over nothing and it causes big internal problems. He says “real stress or imagined stress, it doesn’t mean beans to you body.”

Sometimes in life we experience miracles. And sometimes we experience what I call “imagined miracles.” I had one of those this week. I went to the bank to make a deposit, and the teller showed me our bank account, saying that this was the total after the deposit. Then I went home, and we looked at our bills and it seemed like we came up way short this month. My wife used the bank app to check the account again, and there was a lot more money in there. A whole paycheck worth.

What had happened, of course, is that the teller gave me the total before the deposit, not after. This wasn’t a miracle, it was simply a mistake. But when you are praying for God to provide for you and you don’t know how you’re going to be able to pay all your bills, that quote from the general of the Cranium Command comes to mind again in a new way. Real miracle or imagined miracle, it doesn’t mean beans to my faith in God. I prayed that God would make it so we had enough money, and He did. He did it through ordinary ways without bending any laws of physics, but He did exactly what I asked Him to do. It wasn’t a real miracle, but it was an opportunity to be reminded that my God always takes care of me.