When the deer died in the woods, I didn't notice. Maybe it had been hit by a car and had stumbled away from the road before succumbing to its injuries. Maybe it had just been unhealthy, and passed away unnoticed by the world.
It had been a busy spring. I had a baby. Number eight. My estranged father, three thousand miles away, had fallen and broken his neck and was now a quadriplegic, unable to move from the neck down. I visited him for the first time in twenty-seven years. Unable to be long away from my family, I begged a priest I had never met, a friend of a friend, to visit him after I left, to offer him the sacraments.
My father received the Anointing of the Sick and made his confession after several decades away from the Church, away from Christ. God bless the priest, whom I had never met but only spoken to on the phone. I would have liked to have thanked him in person.
At the time, I was preparing a new ministry for its debut at a conference 500 miles away, caring for my family, and vacationing. I was much too busy to notice the fall of a deer in the woods near our house.
But the fact did not escape Raven, our pure-blooded German Shepherd, who followed her long snout to the carcass and gorged on the rotting remains.
We noticed a problem as soon as she began vomiting and scratching her ears raw. The vet diagnosed deer bones in the colon and sarcoptic mange. Scabies. Nothing life-threatening for humans, but as high on the gross factor as on the contagion list. "No one touch the dog!" I yelled, knowing how often I had seen the two-year-old lick her.
Raven was now tied to a tree, her leadline the frustrating radius of her restrictied circle of movement, while the medicated dip dealt its chemical destruction to the colony of mange. She could no longer come in the house, as the bugs would infect anything she touched. She howled her frustration and strangers backed away.
It was the day before the conference. Approval for the brochures had been delayed, and I had spent big bucks for expedited shipping. When I returned from shopping, there was no box. The customer service rep said the driver thought the dog was dangerous and did not get out of the truck.
"I can't go to a tradeshow without brochures!" I howled, in solidarity with the dog's frustration. When they found the package, it was too late for delivery. We would have to wait until the morning. We would not be able to leave on time.
I paced the house, grumbling at the leash keeping me from getting on the road. My family backed away. The next day, three hours delayed, we started out, arriving twelve hours later at the hotel near the convention center. Too late. They had given our rooms away. I didn't laugh at my husband's feeble joke. No room at the inn. Ha ha.
I tried not to growl at the man behind the counter as I explained the nature of my reservations, and the exhausted children in the parking garage below. He found a room for us. It was on the top floor, near the suites. A nice substitute, and probably bigger than we would have had. I accepted, maybe a little less than graciously.
Early the next morning, I noticed a commotion at the suite down the hall — several priests and lay people preparing to have a private Mass and confession. I made a mental note and a resolution to "crash" their Mass the next morning.
At hair-still-wet the next morning, I was seated in the suite-become-chapel listening to a young priest who looked like a cross between a surfer and a football player. He was telling his vocation story during a meditation before Mass.
It was my birthday.
"You can't put God in a box," the young priest was saying. "When I finally admitted I had a vocation to the priesthood, I was convinced I wanted to be a parish priest in a small town in California. God had other plans."
"I want to tell you a story about the power of prayer," the priest went on. "A lady called me and asked me to go visit her father who had just broken his neck and was in the hospital."
I looked closely at the priest.
"She lived on the other side of the country and hadn't seen him for almost thirty years, but had been praying for him to come back to Christ."
I sat up.
"I went to see him, and after decades away from the Church he went to confession and received the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. We have to keep on praying, never stop praying. God hears our prayers. God loves us."
I looked at him, dazed. Could this be the priest who had gone to see my father?
After Mass, I scurried out into the hotel hallway, and found him in a makeshift confessional. He shook my hand politely until I explained who I was.
"It was you? It was you? No way!" He pumped my hand, his smile lighting the corridor. "Isn't that amazing? I wasn't even going to tell that story this morning!" I could hear God in his words, God saying to me, "I love you so much that I made the completely improbable a reality, just to please you."
"He's a God of details," I quipped, but it wasn't until later, when I had time to reflect, that I realized the chain of events God had worked out in order to tell me he loved me on my birthday.
If the priest hadn't told the story. If I hadn't "crashed" the Mass. If we had not been on that floor of the hotel. If they hadn't given away our room. If we had arrived on time. If the approvals had come. If the package had arrived. If the dog had not been outdoors on a leadline, barking. If the dog had not had scabies. If the deer had not died in the woods.
That's how much God loves me.
