I Am a Dork, But God Loves Me Anyway

For those who saw my facebook post earlier this afternoon (and those who didn’t…) here is the full story of today’s miracle money.

About 10 o’clock this morning I was sitting in my car in the church parking lot filling out some requested paperwork for the church office.  It was supposed to be 20 degrees feeling like 16 today so I didn’t want to go through the hassle of taking everyone in and out of the car, thus I ran in the office, grabbed the paper I needed to complete, and went back out to the car to fill in the blanks.  Anyway, while we were sitting there in the car my phone rang.  I looked at the 931 area code and was surprised to see that one of our friends from Tennessee must be calling.  When I answered the phone I was even more surprised.  The woman on the other end of the phone quickly introduced herself, said she was calling from Six Seeds TV and asked if I remembered entering a contest to win $2000.  Taken back a bit I answered “yes”, even though the memory was very vague and I really had no idea what she was talking about.  She then went on to tell me that we had won.  It took me a second to realize what exactly it was she was telling me, and then I think I said something totally stupid like, “Wow! Thanks!”  Like I said in the title, I am a dork.  Ha! 

Well, apparently I really did enter a contest to win $2000 towards our adoption costs.  Remembering just bits of this, I came home and found the contest thanks to the search box at Six Seeds and even found the dumb little comment I had submitted.  (A comment that makes it even more incredible that we won, mind you.)  The deal was you logged onto their website, left a comment after the contest information and then a winner would be selected from among all the comments left.  Obviously this winner was chosen randomly and not based upon the comment, mind you, as all I wrote was “thank you for this opportunity” versus some other people explaining exactly where they were in the process, where they were adopting from, the name or age of their child, etc.  Once again, I feel the dork title might fit here as well.  If I had only known then…

The most ironic part of this is that even now that I remember entering, I don’t really remember how I found out about the contest.  I have looked back through some things and figured out that I originally got linked up with Six Seeds information when Show Hope encouraged people to comment on a different article on the website – for that article every comment left resulted in a $2 donation from Six Seeds to Show Hope.  I remember doing that.  And after that I guess I started getting Six Seeds updates via email.  I suppose it was one of those emails that shared the invitation for this contest, so I guess that is how this started. 

Anyway, back to today’s excitement.  Apparently the woman who called me this morning has been trying to inform me of our winning status via email for a couple of weeks now.  I don’t know how I missed these, but somehow I have.  I vaguely remember seeing something saying “I’ve been trying to contact you about your winning…” but I know I thought it was spam as for some reason I receive “winning status” emails quite often in my mother-in-law’s name and I just delete them.  I am sure I saw the word winner and hit the spam button on that one.  The original emails, however, no idea.  Absolutely no memory.  Luckily this woman hunted us down.  She told me that her editor had told her yesterday that if she couldn’t contact us soon they should probably select another winner.  Aahhh!!  We almost lost our fantastic blessing!!  The good news here is that this woman happens to be friends with someone at Show Hope who recognized our name and provided her my cell phone number.  Talk about a small world!  And a grateful cell phone owner!!  I have never loved my little non-texting, no picture sending device any more than right now.  :)

So, here we are.  In this short conversation this morning we were told we are now $2000 closer to having Jack home, and now I get to go back and change some numbers on the grant application I’m working on – stating now that our need is $2000 less than it was yesterday.  Is there a better change to make to such a piece of paper?  I think not!  And, really, how can you beat that?  God never ceases to amaze me.

After all of this took place this morning a friend of ours at Dan’s office said to me, “You must be really nice or praying a lot.”  I would like to think we are really nice, but I can guarantee we are praying a lot.  And that a lot of other people are too - thank YOU, very much.  So, although I am a total dork who couldn’t seem to figure out emails I was receiving meant we had won a $2000 contest – God loves me anyway and He found a way to reach us despite my shortcoming.  Hurray for that!

Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good.
            His love endures forever.  (Psalm 136:1)