I collected stories about how faith kept people moving forward and put them together as a devotional for this Lenten season.
You can download the entire devotional here:
https://www.mosaicpearland.org/s/lent.pdf

From Rev. Jim Liberatore+
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

God’s hand in our lives seems to appear, looking back, out of nowhere.

My wife, Christine, and I were moving for a promotion that neither of us felt good about. I would become a desk jockey in a high rise in Chicago after years in the oil patch. We went house-hunting the morning after we arrived. Our car had been parked next to the moving van.

We returned for lunch. The van was gone. An organized group had been stealing moving vans parked off the interstate. We would never see anything we had from 1977 back to birth. We made the front page of the paper. It was a great but sad lead story.

Our family had not been to church in a while. It was not a priority even though both Christine and I had gone to church every week growing up. Christianity was in our bones but not our practice.

What happened next surprised us.

It was an overwhelming sense of peace, a feeling that everything would be fine, even if restoration was out of the question. We wondered why this peace came over us.

Our priorities were out of alignment. Did we value things and comfort too much? We wondered if the God of our childhood was speaking to us. God was. Even if we weren’t sold yet. We risked following our heart.

The community that we did not know came to our aid. It was a hard recovery. I asked for a job in the field that did not exist. The Amoco HR person told me, “Well, we have this job in very rural western Colorado that no one wanted. I’ll check.” He checked. It was still open.

We took it.

We realized that God had spoken to us and we began to reassess what was important. We felt alive again. We knew it was God’s doing. We began to move God back into the center of our lives. God never leaves us.