Lucky Charms

We often talk about God's power and majesty, His goodness, His long-suffering, His loving kindness. One term that we often use to describe how God is always doing what is best for us, always loving and forgiving us more than we deserve, always helping us even when we are too proud or stupid or stubborn to ask is the phrase "the Lord's tender mercies." This is an absolutely essential aspect of God's character and one of the biggest sources of aid and comfort in our lives. But I think we should consider another of God's aspects. In addition to His tender mercies, we should also be grateful for our Heavenly Father's lucky charms, or, to put it in a less pithy but clearer way, we should be grateful for our Heavenly Father's charming and endearing obsession with introducing a little luck and magic into our lives. There are moments in our lives that work out so perfectly, the only way to describe it is lucky. Sometimes these moments of serendipity are incredibly important, like the chance encounter that leads to the love of our life, or a friend of a friend happening to know someone hiring for our dream job. But sometimes we find luck in the most common and ordinary places - getting all green lights on the way to work, opening our to go box and finding an extra chicken finger, thinking about a particular song and it popping up next on shuffle. These little moments seem to have no major impact on the course of our lives, and our day may have gone on more or less the same whether they happened or not. But God loves us so much that He gives us these little tiny moments of luck, but because we need it or because it's important but simply because He loves us and He gets as much or more joy than we do through these lucky little moments of simple pleasures and happy accidents. When we are counting our blessings, we ought always to be on the lookout to recognize all of the Lord's tender mercies, but we also ought to take the time to notice and savor all of the Lord's little lucky charms as well.