The Helper

"Lord, make us a blessing and a help to someone today," I prayed when I woke up yesterday.  We hadn't gone to church the night before, since Howard noticed a problem with a tire and spent time prying off a wheel cover and loosening lug bolts, uncovering the valve stem where he needed to put in air.  Apparently, whoever installed the tire had left the cover askew.  Thankfully, we  had had no problems on our 40 mile trip to Stillwater that day.

Our first stop on our errands yesterday morning was to get air in the tire.  "Oh, no," Howard grumbled when he saw a car there before us at the air hose pump.  Two young women were fluttering around their car, up and down and back and forth to the dispenser.  I told him they would probably be finished soon, so we waited.  After a good ten minutes, they still hadn't moved, so I suggested he see if he could help them.

Howard went over, taking his air gauge, and asked them if he could be of assistance, then disappeared from my view as he knelt to work with their tire.  Now it was my turn to wait.  Evidently, something was wrong with the dispenser device, as the girls kept approaching it and pounding it.  Finally, Howard came back.

"What was wrong?"  I asked him.  He said they'd had trouble getting the tire to take air, but he worked with it until he got 20 pounds of pressure into it.  They had thanked him, and he'd suggested they go to another service station to get more air, which is what we had to do for our tire.

I was telling my son about our adventure later that day, and he said, "Oh, the hose on that machine is old and cracked, and the air leaks out."  Apparently he'd had experience there with his vehicles.  "I've thought about buying them a new hose, myself," he said, "I like to go there because that's the only place that has free air that I know of." We found that out getting our tire inflated!

Later, I realized that God had answered my prayer. He had placed someone in our path that we could help!
And I learned a spiritual lesson, too.  The Holy Spirit is likened to air in the Bible, especially when Jesus is talking to Nicodemus who had come at night with his questions. In John 3:8, Jesus says, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and wither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."

If we allow our connection with the Lord to become unused, old, and cracked, we may have a hard time time feeling the breath of the Holy Spirit.  "We leak," someone once said, when illustrating that we need to be continually "being filled" with the Spirit.  How much better to keep our spirits pliable, fresh and unobstructed so that we are buoyant with His Spirit, and as my  preacher husband says, "with our sails filled with air and a spring in our steps!"  A sure way to be blessed and a blessing to others!