A Lost Bee in a Thousand Leaves
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My husband and I have several huge oak trees surrounding our house that provide much-needed shade in the heat of the summer, and in the fall season, the trees bless us with their brilliant colors. However, they also create a lot of work when they drop their leaves. My yearly practice is to wait until all the leaves have fallen so that I only need to rake them up once. As you can imagine, this process takes many hours.
Hanging on the overhang along the front of our home are eight wind chimes that play beautiful tunes on windy days. In the center of one of those wind chimes hangs a brightly painted yellow bee on a piece of black wood.
My husband lovingly crafted it for me.
While raking the leaves one fall day, the handle of my rake bumped into this wind chime and broke the string, causing the yellow bee to fall into the mound of leaves below. Before I realized what had happened, I raked more leaves on top of the pile, burying the yellow bee even deeper. When I glanced around and saw the bee was missing, I quickly offered up a prayer and started to feel through the leaves, trying to locate the precious item.
It had no monetary value, but it was special to me because my husband painted it, and our three-year-old grandson, Hunter, likes to make all the chimes play their unique sounds when he comes to visit Mimi and Papaw J. I kept asking God to help me find the lost bee as I continued to rake the remainder of the yard. Finally, after several hours, I returned to the area where the painted bee had fallen and began to load the piles of leaves into the trailer to haul off and dump in the woods. As I loaded the trailer, my prayers continued to ascend heavenward.
Thankfully, God never wearies of our prayers, regardless of how insignificant they may seem. Toward the end of my loading, God directed my hands to the exact spot where the lost bee was. While crying tears of joy, I immediately stopped to praise Him for His goodness and love and for hearing and answering my prayer.
Our Father, who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, also cares about a lost hand-painted yellow bee that hangs from the wind chimes of one of His daughters.
Kathy Hull
