Have you ever had an early morning drive thru blessing?
Sounds kinda silly really, but I found that the value of the experience was in learning the power of blessing. I had been reading a book by Kerry Kirkwood titled, The Power of Blessing and it wasn’t too long after I finished it that I got to see the power of blessing in action. The opportunity to bless came quickly and unexpectedly teaching me that in reality the opportunities to bless are all around us, all of the time, if only we use them.
The experience was quite simple actually and even though it was a small thing it taught me a big truth. I’d finished the book quickly before going to bed and didn’t spend much time pondering what I’d read because I needed to be up early in the morning to get to the prison for our monthly Kairos Prison Ministry reunion. When my friend picked me up before daybreak, she’d said she wanted to get a sausage biscuit when we got on the road so we stopped at the nearest McDonald’s.
It took FOREVER for the car in front of us in the drive-thru to finish their order. It seemed they were having great difficulty but finally rolled up to the window. After placing an order totaling $1.06 for a sausage biscuit we finally drove up to the window after what seemingly was an eternity only to be forced to wait even longer as I watched the employees mill about chatting to one another. We became increasingly frustrated as our bag sat inside the closed window just out of our reach. As I longingly looked at that bag with time running short normally I would have wanted to ‘speak my mind’ and rightly so in this situation as it was becoming ridiculous. When all of a sudden a thought popped into my mind and I actually said out loud, “Let’s see how this works”. Speaking out loud to no one in particular, I said “Lord, bless them, just bless them” in the direction of the closed window. Shortly after that, someone came to hand me the bag and told me my ‘chicken biscuit’ was ready. I replied, that we’d ordered a sausage biscuit, she said, “Oh, I am sorry for your wait, would you like an apple pie?” I said, I’d rather have hash browns, (it was 6:00 am in the morning). “No problem”, she replied and quickly returned to hand me the bag.
My friend and I discovered as we drove off that there was a biscuit, a hash brown and an apple pie for each of us. It appeared that after praying blessing over them instead of complaining, we were the ones who were blessed as we both ate breakfast that morning for $1.06. I was so encouraged that I shared our testimony of blessing as the focus of my unprepared inspirational talk at the monthly Kairos Prison Ministry reunion. My sharing proved to be inspirational in challenging the inmates and rest of us to choose to be ‘blessers’ rather then complainers no matter the situation. Even as prison inmates we can be blessed in unexpected ways as we bless others.