enough

I walked briskly to the car. I was running behind to get my daughter from my mother-in-law after church. It was only the sunlight bouncing off the quarter that caught my attention so I scooped it up from the sidewalk and jumped in my car. At church, I spotted the $1 coffee bar and decided to help myself, but sadly only found $.75 in my wallet. As I was contemplating committing theft in church, I remembered the quarter in my pocket from earlier. Success! I had a fresh hot cup of coffee and my baby in my arms a few minutes later. Later that night as I was getting ready for bed, I emptied my pockets before tossing my pants in the hamper. There it was. A quarter. But I had spent the quarter from earlier…right? I never carried cash and surely didn’t make a habit of keeping change in my pockets. So where did this quarter come from??? In that moment, the Lord spoke to my weary heart and said “This is my reminder to you that I am always with you and you will always have enough.”

At that point in my life, nothing seemed like it was enough. There was never enough money, never enough love and never enough time. So I treasured that sweet gesture from the Lord and thanked Him for making His presence known to me in such a tangible way. But that isn’t the only time this happened. The day the Lord asked me to uproot my family and move 40 minutes across town to be a part of a satellite campus of our church that I had never even visited, there was a quarter. After a really tough therapy session, I looked down on the floorboard of my car and there was a quarter.

And this morning, as the kids and I walked from the donut shop to the cleaners to pick up some laundry, there was a quarter. On this morning where the exhaustion and emotional toll of the past week had pushed me to the edge of sanity and had me contemplating a jump, there was a quarter. My daughter spotted it at the same time and yelled “QUARTER!” She scooped it up and looked straight at me. “You know what that means, don’t you?” I asked and she responded “Yep! God is with us right now and He will never leave us!” Yes, baby girl, that is what it means. On this day where I was ready to crawl back in bed and pull the covers over my head by 8:32am, He gently reminded me that I was not alone. I am not alone. I will never be alone.

Isaiah 54:17 states:

“No weapon formed against you shall prosper.”

Listen up! There WILL be weapons. The enemy will take every cheap shot and every dirty trick in the book to get you distracted from your “enough.” The weapons he forms are vile and heinous and pure evil and they will come at you in your weakest moments. H.A.L.T. (hungry, angry, lonely or tired) are some of the times that find us at our most vulnerable. But even on the days when everything else is empty, His presence is enough. And the Lord is so gracious to drop us a quarter or a flower or a little something to grab our attention and remind us of Him. To remind us that we are not alone and the battles we fight are rarely flesh and blood. The battles are spiritual and victory has already been won. It is not the battle that is the problem; it is our distraction that causes us to lose ground and assume defeat. And you know what assuming does, right?!?!

Enough. When I take a deep breath and exhale the battles of the day, I come back to enough. The things I have and the things I lack in this world don’t determine it. The successes and failures of my life don’t make it so. My enough is most clear when all else is stripped away and only He remains. Only Jesus and a pocket full of quarters.

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