Goodwill Does It Again!

**This is one of my favorite posts from last year. Not only am I buried in plastic Easter eggs, kept up all night with feverish, coughing kids, but also this: I hurt my back. FROM CARRYING TOO MANY LIBRARY BOOKS.

See, folks. This is why I DON'T play sports. I can't even be a geek without getting an injury.

Carry on, now. Read about plates.

Everything on my dining room table screams, "the 90s." It starts with the hunter green plates and goes downhill from there. And my plates! They are round!

Oh, how out of fashion I am, and always will be. This doesn't mean that I don't like the latest styles, au contraire. But I'm cheap, and I'm green. "Hunter" green, in fact.

We've had this set of dishes for a good ten years. Slowly but surely, they've cracked and chipped to the point we no longer have a large enough set to invite a couple of friends over for dinner.

This is all under the assumption that we "have friends" and would "invite them over."

So I sent The Mister out to buy us a new set of plates. Eighteen hours later, he came home with a truckload of pictures of plates, complete with shots of the price tags.

(You might find this mode of shopping a bit odd, but well, we are odd, and he's a shutterbug. And we have three kids who enjoy shopping for plates about as much as they enjoy eating the broccoli that sits atop them.)

Do you know it costs about 200 gazillion dollars to buy a new set of plates? Because it isn't just the plates you're replacing. It's the trendy and matching place mats, cups, saucers, bowls, and napkins. And once all that is replaced, the dining room table just plain Looks Bad too.

So I quickly grew an even closer attachment to hunter green. And when praying before lunch one day, I blasted out a request for some plates to match the ones we already had.

Because sometimes I like to give God a little "Pop Quiz."

Just to see if he's listening.

(Because sometimes I wonder.)

I headed out to Goodwill that afternoon, taking my six-year-old along with me. That move was just my way of being even more obnoxious, pointing my Mama Finger heavenward and shouting, "Prove it! Prove that you care! Prove you will provide!"

So we sauntered through the secondhand store, and wouldn't you know, in the mismatched hodge podge dishes aisle was a stack of plates. Our plates. Hunter green plates. And just to throw a cherry on top, sitting nearby were a few matching coffee cups as well.

I knelt down, looked my son in the eye and said, "See? See who God is? See what he has done for us? He is good. Good."

Then we shared a smile--and with thankful hearts--paid a pittance for our plates.

And on the ride home, instead of chanting "Goodwill does it again," we had changed our tune.

"God has done it again."

And it felt good to be green. Hunter green.


**Update: Since that day, we have yet to find another plate to match. But we always look.