Letter from God

The other day I was going through a pile of books that I had acquired over the years.  Most of them I hadn't read and I was weeding through the ones that I thought I might never read. There was one particular book that I kept picking up and putting back in my pile to go through.  I had often left my pile of books, which occupied my staircase, only to return and find this particular book back in the "to go through" pile.  Several times I knew I had thrown it down the stairs to "get rid of" pile.  This was the last time, I conciously picked it up to throw it down the stairs.  As I did, an envelope fell out of the book....a sealed envelope with no name, no stamp....just a sealed envelope.  I fumbled through the pages of the book to make sure there was nothing else within except for what one would expect to find in there, paper and black ink.  There wasn't, so I threw it down, picked up the envelope, held it and stared at it as if it might open itself and then out of anger for no longer being sealed, give me a papercut.  Who seals an envelope, forgets to write anything on it, and stuffs it in a boring book?, I thought to myself.  I opened the envelope with great anticipation.  It read:

 "They that wait upon the Lord

Shall renew their strength;

They shall mount up with wings

as eagles...."

Isaiah 40:31

That was it.  Nothing inside, nothing on the back.  No name.  

My life had been very overwhelming up to that point.  It was in that moment that a huge weight had been lifted off of me; for I realized, that for all my seemingly unanswered prayers, all my sleepless nights, somewhere, there was a God who had someone put that letter in a book for no apparent reason, knowing that I would need to find that letter on that day, in that hour, in that moment.  It wasn't too soon, and it most certainly wasn't too late.  It was the perfect timing.

I like to think that the person who put that letter in that book, still wonders where they might have placed that letter.  It makes me smile to think they were used by God and didn't even know it; in fact attributes it to their old age :)