A Chain of Miracles

This month I want to share astonishing connected miracles that took place over the course of a few months.
1. When I left a job in community mental health to open a private therapy practice, my team gave me a yellow rose bush, not realizing we live on a wooded lot. The only sun was alongside our driveway. For two years it grew a little, but no buds.
2. February of year three, I’m astonished coming down our icy drive…I see a rose. A yellow bloom peeking through the snow! And yes. I picked it.
3. Spring. A friend invites us to see him perform in the play “Nun Sense,” where the audience is treated as Catholic School children. At the end, the Mother Superior actor says she can prove we were horrible students. She will ask five questions and there will be a prize if anyone can answer them. I answered all of them. I suppose it was my “trained observer/nerd response” allowing me to notice mismatched shoelaces or be able to repeat a line an actor had said. The Mother Superior was so stunned she threw up her hands saying, “no one has ever answered them before,” and told me to come forward after the play for my prize. When I did, I told her a prize wasn’t necessary, but she insisted and handed me a ten-inch statue of a nun that was a prop from her desk. I took it to my office and put it with the play therapy figures for use in sand sculptures.
4. Hubs and I have a great friend who listens to his inner guidance. That spring, while I was swamped with authoring my doctoral dissertation, he made a surprise visit to give me the movie and soundtrack CD to “The Rookie,” saying he wasn’t sure why he felt called to do it, but he had to make sure I had them.
5. Weeks later while I’m hard at work writing that tome, hubs previewed the movie and called me to the living room. Since opening my practice, I had been told that I was referred the cases that were “impossible causes,” the abused and neglected children whose fates would be decided in court. I had appeared as an expert witness hundreds of times. In The Rookie the characters can’t get grass to grow so they ask St. Rita of Cascia, the Saint of Impossible Causes, to pray along with them for God to grow grass.
6. I went back to my computer and researched her. My scalp began to tingle when all the miracles came together like puzzle pieces. On her deathbed when snow covered the ground, St. Rita asked for a yellow rose from Cascia. And they were found. In the snow.
7. I excitedly tell hubs to turn off the movie, it’s late, but we must go to my office. I need to find that nun statue. And, yes, it was St. Rita of Cascia. Holding yellow roses!
8. Only hubs knew about St. Rita. I wasn’t keeping her a secret; it was that the miracles were so sacred I wasn’t ready to share yet. In court the next week, guess what’s in my purse? Yep, the statue. Although the bailiff knew me, he still checked my things before I entered the courthouse. When he peeked into my purse, he pointed to the statue and asked humorously, “Is that a weapon?” I respond, “Yes. A weapon of the Lord.”
9. I exit court where we prevailed and walk to the parking lot. An artificial yellow rose was on my windshield, (in the picture at the top of this blog). Trust me, my knees went weak.

I contacted the societies that bear St. Rita’s name and ask them to pray with me for the children I represented and to strengthen my testimony. They all responded graciously. (Saints don’t perform miracles they just pray with us, like passing Jesus in the hall up in heaven saying, “By the way, Deborah has a special request.”) No different than asking our living Christian friends to pray with us.
On the morning I defend my dissertation, hubs had told me to have a bag packed for a surprise trip. After months of grueling preparation, that turned out to be a smooth defense, I float to the car with smiles because his every sentence begins with “Doctor,” new music to my ears. He keeps our destination a secret until we cross into Philadelphia. “Doctor Deborah we have an appointment to meet with the priest at the Cathedral of Saint Rita. He is giving you a private tour. After all these miracles connected to her, I couldn’t think of anywhere you would rather be.”

What miracles in your life have surprised you?
Our friend was instrumental in my understanding God’s chain, by listening to his intuition and bringing me the movie? Can you share a story where intuition has been a link in a chain of miracles?