Episode Transcript
It is all too often said that there are no miracles performed these days. Well, I'd like to challenge this idea with my story of how my mother bought a house that she needed. Welcome to miracles in the 21st century.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. My dad died when I was 13.
My mum and younger brother constituted our family. And about a decade later my mother became quite ill and my younger brother took her for a holiday up to Cairns. She fell in love with Cairns.
At the time we were living at Buluroo on the northern part of Lake Macquarie, which was an old town near a very large lead smelter. My mother loved Cairns and she decided to sell her house at Buluru and move up there. When she arrived, my brother had built a small homemade caravan for her to live in and my brother and her had moved into this caravan park and I'd come up to help them at that time.
But the first day they were there, a man came and spoke to my mother and said, lady, as an older lady, it's no point staying in this caravan park in your caravan, because this whole area is going to turn into a quagmire in very shortly as the wet season comes, it won't be very suitable to live in. And that really scared my mother. She wondered now what could she do? How could she get a house? And the next day as she got up, she'd got up early in the morning and had gone off for a walk.
And my brother and I woke up a little bit later and found, oh, mother's gone. And we waited and we waited and we waited. And about 10 o'clock that morning my mother came home with this story.
And what had happened was early in the morning she decided to go for a walk and pray. And she'd prayed to God that God would somehow help her to buy a house and to find a house to buy. And as she was walking along, we were in the suburb of Masons Beach, a little suburb just north of the airport in Cairns, little beachside suburb.
And this is back in the early 1970s, so it wasn't as developed as it is now. And my mother had gone for a walk and as she passed a little corner store in the suburb, she felt impressed to go in. And she went in and asked the shopkeeper there if he knew of anyone who was selling a house.
And he said to her, well, he said, actually, it's interesting, he said, just about half an hour ago, Mr. So and so came in and was talking to me about how he has to sell his house. His wife had died 12 months before and everything still reminded her of him.
And he felt he needed a new change. And so my mother asked the shopkeeper, where does this man live? And the shopkeeper said, well, I'm not sure where he lives. But just at that moment, or just a moment or before, a little girl had come into the shop.
And she said to my mother, oh, I know where Mr. So and so lives. I go right past his place.
I'll take you there. And so this little girl, after they bought their shopping, had taken my mother to this gentleman's house. She'd gone in and talked with the gentleman.
He was so pleased to find someone who was interested in buying their house. And they negotiated a price that my mother could afford. But what was more important was because she was moving such a long way, she had decided to give away all her furniture that she had at the house at Buluroo.
And because there was was no point paying the cost to have it transported, you know, two and a half thousand kilometres or so up there. And this house was coming fully furnished with a whole lot of new white goods that they'd bought just a couple of years before. New refrigerator, new washing machine, new stove.
I praise the Lord for how he answered my mother's prayer. And that's my story of a real life miracle.
