The Midnight Email: A Miracle Story

It's all too often said that there are no miracles performed these days. Well, I like to challenge this idea with my story of God's watch care over myself and my wife and some friends. Welcome to miracles in the 21st century. I'm Dr. John Ashton. Just a few days ago my wife and I returned from a cruise to New Guinea. We were celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary and we had planned to go to New Guinea. My wife had gone there for a while after finishing school and spent time with some missionary friends up there at that time. And my wife also had an uncle who had worked as a missionary for many years in New Guinea. And so this was an opportunity for us to do something special to celebrate our anniversary and to enjoy this, you know, experiencing the culture up there. I had never been to New guinea myself and so we'd planned this trip and organised it and just before leaving we'd been praying for several days for safe travelling, that everything would work out. So we had organised to get up at half past four in the morning. Some friends were to pick us up at a quarter past five in the morning to take us to the airport to catch an early morning flight up to Brisbane to catch the. To be on board the cruise ship by 1:30 as the ship was leaving at 3pm and I was up finishing some work that evening I was dealing with some things and it was still nearly 9 o'clock and I was just finishing up when I heard my wife's phone beep and I thought, oh well, we'll just cheque what it might be. And what it was, it was an email. We'd just received an email from the airline to say that our flights had been cancelled and they had moved our flight to a flight leaving at 4:15 in the afternoon, getting to Brisbane at 4:30. Well, of course the cruise ship left at 3:00 so, wow, what were we to do now? And so fortunately I was, as I said, I was, well, I was about actually to go to bed. If it hadn't have been for work and my just finishing off some, finalising some things before we go, I would have been in bed at that time and I rang our friends, they didn't answer the phone. They had already gone to bed in preparation for getting up at 4:30 the next morning. And so I rang the airline and they, the different flights that they had, none were flying out of the city of Newcastle and there were no flights really that would work for us. But then I thought, oh, what about out of Sydney? We can perhaps catch a train down to Sydney, and praise the Lord, there were flights out of Sydney, and in the morning that would get us in time to the cruise terminal to be able to cheque in and get on our cruise. And in time for us, if we were up at 5 o'clock in the morning to catch the train, and we were able, in actual fact, able to catch the 20 to 6 train that went past where we were, that got us into Sydney the next morning in time to catch the flight. So I praised the Lord that I had stayed up and that I was awake at that time to get that message and was able to work out, otherwise we would have missed our cruise. And so, in many ways, God, we can see, can watch over us in our lives, if we commit our lives to him. I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.