Saturday Surprise

Wow! God really knows how to bless! We had wanted a big-screen television set for a long time, checking them out at Walmart and comparing prices. Still, it would be a big splurge. Maybe for Christmas. Then Saturday at an estate sale we saw a 37” flat screen table model for $150. Howard put a bid on it for $100, and our bid was accepted! It has great color and we really like it. But finding a place to put it was a problem. This couldn’t go in either of our small bedrooms, and since it was not a thin-line model, we couldn’t put it over the fireplace or bookcase in our living room.

The only other alternative was to put it on a tall, bistro-type table occupying one corner of the front room. The table itself was almost too big for the living room; we bought it several years ago for a special dining area in the large house we had in Mississippi. The legs are massive, making it heavy and awkward to move. We seldom use it for eating, since we aren’t always in the mood to hike ourselves up on the tall chairs, instead using the table we have had for nearly 50 years in the dining room.

“Where are you going to put this?” our son, Greg, asked as he was preparing to help unload the (nearly) impossibly heavy tv set. As I cleared off the table, he noticed the leaf in it, called a butterfly leaf, that we had never been able to figure out. The table has remained full size ever since we’ve had it.

“You can’t make it smaller,” I told him, “the leaf won’t fold down.” Not to be deterred, he tugged it open, crawled under and inspected it, then pushed the divided leaf, hard. It folded, and, voila! it pushed closed! Now the table was much smaller, making it just right for the tv and giving us much-needed space in the living room! Thank you, Lord! And thank you, Greg!

We had been looking forward to watching a special revival service on the internet that night, but we discovered that in changing the cable to the new set, Greg had disconnected the internet. We would get him to fix it the next day when they came over for Sunday dinner. Disappointed, we turned on the new television set just in time to see the “Precious Memories” logo of a Gaither Homecoming coming on. It turned out to be a wonderful program featuring The Crabb Family, whom we had seldom watched before. It felt like revival in our living room as they sang under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, in full screen and living color!