Finding God’s Fingerprints

I’ll never forget an experience I had several years ago, I was speaking at a huge event that thousands of women were attending. For the event, I had purchased a red dress that had a black satin sash around the waist. And that morning, as I was preparing for my turn to go on stage, I found that I was concentrating more on trying to keep that black satin sash tied together than I was on the details of my presentation. I kept going into the bathroom over and over again and realizing that that sash untied it would fall down at my feet.

And finally, just before my turn to go on stage, I walked into the bathroom one last time to figure out what to do with my black satin sash. The woman who was in charge of running the event walked in right behind me and walked into a bathroom stall.

I sat in front of the mirror and just focused on retiring and retain that sash. And finally, I said to her, “You wouldn’t happen to have a safety pin, would you?”

I could hear her start laughing from behind the bathroom stall door. And I thought to myself, “Oh, maybe this is awkward. Maybe she’s one of those people who doesn’t appreciate when people talk to you when you’re in a bathroom stall.” But then she said to me, “You are not going to believe this.”

And I said, “What?”

And she said, “Hold on just a second.” And I could hear her take a picture with her camera and then a text popped up on my phone and I open it up and I looked, and there on the handle of the stall that she was in with a safety pin that someone had attached earlier, who even knows when?

And she said to me seriously, “What are the odds that this would happen, that there would be a safety pin on the door of the stall that I am in?” And I thought to myself, “It is so true.”

Think about it. What are the odds that we would have gone into the bathroom at the same time, just before I was going on stage, that she would have chosen that stall of all the eight stalls that were in that bathroom? That on that door would be hanging a safety pin, that was just the right size to pin the sash on to my red dress so that it would stay still?

This is one of those moments that someone might call a coincidence, but I knew it was a little thing, a way that God was showing that He was aware of me and aware of what I was doing. It was His way of removing a distraction that would allow me to focus on the greater purpose to teach His word to a group of women who had come to that event to be able to focus on what was the most important thing because He would be focusing on the little things. I love those moments in our life when we see His hand when we recognize His fingerprint, and sometimes it doesn’t come with the big miracle or the huge answer we’ve been waiting for. Sometimes we see it in something little like a safety pin hanging on the back of a bathroom door.

Emily Bell Freeman

Finding God’s Fingerprints