Today two things happened to me in prayer. As I sat for my afternoon devotions on the porch (which generally last at least an hour) I was listening to my meditation music, and around the corner of the steps came a gopher.

He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him.

“Hello!” I said….and he was off like a shot.

It makes me happy that nature lives at my front door.

The second event happened around 6:30 P.M. as I was having my evening devotions. I was listening to the book of 1 Corinthians on my phone. The birds and the squirrels were gathered at the feeder eating supper.

Eight or ten doves and several squirrels and a chipmunk were happily munching at the birdseed. Then, they were off like a shot. The rodents skittered into the underbrush and the doves took to the skies in different directions.

The hawk was barely more than a shadow and an explosion of feathers as it grabbed the mourning dove from its flight. It was over leaving only a rain of dove down falling into the sumac below.

Life has been a mix of gopher gladness and great hawk gasps lately.

Brenda got the keys to her new apartment in Zaandam yesterday.

She needed a new laptop. So we prayed and less than two hours later she was on her way to get a new laptop provided by one of her donors.

Then she got a call from her landlord saying that all her furniture had been destroyed by an air B-n-B customer (she had consented to leave her furniture in the apartment if her landlord would hold the apartment for her when she returned).

Gophers or great hawks, you never can tell what’s coming across the porch on any given day. The only assurance is that both will show up at one time or another. Sometimes they will even show up at the same time.

In my experience though God has this singular talent to turn our sorrows into dancing, our gasps into gladness and our great hawks into gophers.

How about you are living in the shadow of great hawks right now or are you playing with the gophers?