Dog Poop Miracles!

Tuesday morning I got up to go to the prayer group I gather with. I warmed up the car, picked up a couple guys and then turned on the heater. The car started to smell aweful! I mean, we all almost threw up, it was gross. So I figured a rat or something had died on my engine, so when we got to prayer, I dropped of the guys and went to the gas station and checked under my hood. I couldn't find anything, but my car still reeked. I drove back down and parked it, leaving the windows open to air it out. During our time together, I asked the men to pray for my car that nothing was wrong, because I didn't want to have to take it to the shop to figure out what was wrong with it.
Sure enough, when we left it still reeked in the car. I panicked internally and figured that God had decided not to fix my car stink problem. Then the guy sitting in the passenger seat showed me something on the plastic floor mat, DOG POOP! That's right, he had stepped in it and brought it into the car. That brought a five minute laugh fest from us as we drove back to my place (with windows down, cause the car still stunk). After arriving at my place, the floor mat was washed clean and I'm happy to report that my car no longer smells bad at all!
As I was walking to work an hour later, I realized that I had not thanked God for fixing the problem. Since it was just dog poop, I figured there was nothing wrong with the car and that was the end of it. But, God did indeed answer the prayer to fix my car and that is, at least to me, a miracle. This may seem like a trivial thing to most people, but it's incidents like this that reveal the true selfish nature of man apart from God.
On Sunday, Pastor Mark talked about 'Y give.' He mentioned praying with Lora about a financial gift back in July that they gave out of faith. They didn't EXPECT a return on that, but God blessed them with one recently with not only the signed contracts for his book writing, but also a royalty advance. The Connection of that prayer and this blessing could only be a God thing, because I would never have put the two together if it had happened to me. The point is that when we pray, we need to be waiting in expectation of what God is going to do. Not so we can selfishly recieve his blessing, but so that when we experience that blessing, we can give God the thanks for it and I believe He will give us the discernment to see how and why He did it the way He did, for the benefit of His Glory (and to help us grow in and understand Him better).
God used a stinky run in with dog poop to teach me a valuable lesson of His goodness and faithfulness to us. My challenge for eveyone would be to always be looking at how and in what God is blessing you. It will allow you to always and increasingly appreciate Him and His grace in you life.