This is utterly unrelated to writing, but it’s not the kind of thing that should be left unsaid.

God is an Amazing, mind-blowingly generous God.

Like many people, we’ve had our share of financial struggles these past few years (and while I’m hopeful that my writing might be our ticket to better things, it ain’t happened yet!), not to mention the various health scares since Wendy’s brush with cancer, but today we got blessed.

Mind you, I consider even the trials we face to be a blessing. I know God means them for our good, and that He is producing a weight of glory in us that far exceeds anything we might face on this earth–but the simple fact is, trials suck. They need a defense. It takes effort to see them as blessings, to find the good in them.

Today we got blessed in a way that needs no defense. It was just out and out good things.

Our neighbor is moving.

No, no. You read that wrong. We’re not blessed because our neighbor is moving. We like our neighbor. Really we do. Our neighbor moving has had the unexpected consequence of blessing us.

Wow. This really isn’t coming out right.

Here’s the thing: our neighbor has a large freezer full of really nice meat, chicken, fish, vegetables, and prepared foods and such that they purchased from Swann a while back… and they can’t take it with them when they move, ’cause they’ll just be on the road too long.

So they gave it all to us. We’re talking upwards of a month’s worth of groceries.

Our freezer was full before. Except that it was mostly jugs of ice we use to make the machine run more efficiently. We’ve been using it to store the bread God blesses us with thanks to the ministry partnership a co-op friend has with our local Panera Bread Company. We use the bagels in our church service and give away loaves to those church members who are in need–ourselves included.

But now both of our freezers are full (the one above the fridge and the big one on the back porch that held nothing but ice and bread till this afternoon).

I’m literally blown away by this generosity. I know it’s God’s favor toward us. Let’s face it. Sometimes, you have to take God’s favor toward you on faith, ’cause it just doesn’t seem like it. It’s not that you’re ungrateful, necessarily, it’s just that a lot feels like it’s going wrong.

Like Cancer. Or unemployment. Or ministering for seven years, and only having a handful of people in your church. Or writing seven novels and only selling a couple hundred copies. These aren’t complaints of mine. These are just the simple facts of life as we’ve known it since moving to Rochester.

We’ve been blessed, too. I have a wonderful job now with a great company that gives me the time to write and blog in the evenings (after the work is done and the guys I care for are asleep, of course!). We have a house by the lake with a library room like I’ve always dreamed of having. We even got to go to Disney! Cars that work and warm cats for cold nights. All manner of good things.

Those things kinda balance out the bad.

But tonight I felt the scales tip toward the good, and I’m reminded again that God really does like us (“You like me! You really like me!” – S. Field). Sometimes it’s good not to have to take God’s goodness on faith, because you can see it with your own eyes.

That’s where we’re at tonight. And I’m reasonably confident we’ll need this blessing to hold on to when Wendy faces yet another surgery for the benign tumor on her arm next week.

God is good. No matter what.