Bank fee’s and God’s Gift
I'm sure this blog is going to take me decades to write. Miracles large and small can affect a persons life in wonderful ways. Sometimes we recognize the miracle and we give glory to God. Sometimes we attribute it to shear luck, random chance, or winning the odds.
We had a miracle in our home today. My wife had setup herself a bank account some time back. It's purpose was to be her bank account once we got divorced. Once we worked though the marriage problems with God's guiding hand we kept it open as a splurge fund. You know going out on dates and getting extra things we don't really need. Well this account had recently caused us some hardship on top of our already stressed finances. There was a check that never cleared the account and my wife forgot about it. Later on it try to clear the account but bounced, at that same time my wife made 4 other tiny charges, (mcDonalds, starbucks) and on her debit card. The bank didn't refuse the charges but allowed them to clear and on top of that showed them as overdrafts. She never setup overdraft protection because it was her understanding that debit charges just would be refused.
This ended up costing us a extra $210. Money we didn't have.
This was going to be impossible for us to pay. Yes things are that tight right now. My wife talked to 4 different people and the bank manager over the phone. They wasn't going to retract the (IMO) dishonest fees. She finally met one of the other managers and they did take off $50. But they forced her to apply for their bank credit card. Then on top of that if we didn't pay it they was going to start charging $5 a day on top of this and send the collection angencies after us.
Well I started calling my parents and my brothers to start praying for us and I prayed for us. This was last week.
Now get this...Then yesterday my wife calls me at home and tells me that even though the car dealership she works is doing the lowest recorded sales since she worked there they still managed to push out Christmas bonus checks. They was going to be significantly smaller than last years checks. So anyone care to guess how much the check was for?
$200
Now tell me that isn't a miracle.
Existence
How people can deny that God is alive is beyond me. How can you not look at a sunset, the trees sway in the wind, the fearsomeness of a thunderstorm, the birth of a child and say there is no God? How everything in the world is so perfectly balanced. How the universe is so magnificently and finely tuned. How a tree's companionship to animals and man change our breath from poison back to fresh air. Thanks to sin though, the world isn't perfect as it was created. But you can see God's glorious works in every single thing this universe holds.
I have been a hobby astronomer since I was old enough to hold my grandfathers binoculars in my hand. I love to look at the uncountable points of light that pierce the dark blanket of night sky. To me as a child this was undeniable proof of a Great and Mighty Creator. I wasn't taught this I knew it at the very center of my own soul.
The cloud mass that crosses through the sky on the clear nights is called the Milky Way. Which is really our backyard view we have looking from Earth, through stellar plane of our galaxy, and into the further regions of outer space.
If we took a trip in a space ship and looked back on our galaxy we would see something that looks like this.
Our Milky Way Galaxy is estimated to be 100,00 light years in diameter. (A light year is a measure of distance that light travels in the vacuum of space in one Earth year) In the galactic picture we are actually located in what is know as the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy . If you look at the illustration to the left you can see pointed out at small square in the Orion Arm that represents our Solar System.
In all actuality this is a perfect location for survival of the human species.
There is fantastic Book by Investigative Journalist Lee Strobel of the Chicago Tribune called "The Case for a Creator"
Here he interviews many astronomers, biologist, mathematicians, professors, evolutionary scientist, and all other areas of study that effects the creation and evolution theories.
He provides extremely compelling evidence that this world had to have a Creator. The entire universe is like a finely built Swiss watch. If any single component wasn't built to exact specifications the human race could never exist.
Cosmologist Carl Sagan who I greatly admire for his extensive work made a comment on this photo taken by the deep space satillite Voyager I in 1990. I quote:
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every 
hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Although I really enjoyed Carls Sagan's Cosmos TV series I have to disagree just based on his research alone. "there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves" Of course there is no hint, God isn't quite to those who are willing to listen. He sent his Son Jesus Christ who suffered a horrible and unforgetable punishment for my sins. He carried the weight of the entire world on his back and defeated death so we might have eternal life. Hint are just tiny clues. Jesus is the wide open eyed truth.
Please everyone go to your local libabry or book store and look for Lee Strobel's book. I know Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron debate on abc wasn't overwhelming proof you needed. (see youtube). I understand the compelexity of the human eye and its perfect design. I understand the odds of everything working together on the human body which deems evoltion as highly impossible. Don't listen to the atheisit activist that just give you point blank around the edge facts. That's 99% truth and 1% lie tactics. They don't want or even try to realize they do this.
The evidence is there.