I believe in miracles. This is one of my favorite stories. This is not something that I wrote but am sharing. I have seen it in shorter versions in email forwards but I like this longer (and maybe its the original?) version best. I hope this causes you to wonder on the power of prayer too. Be blessed and seek the Lord today!
The question is: How much does a prayer weigh?
The only man I ever heard of who tried to weigh one still does not know.
Once upon a time he thought he did. That was when he owned a little grocery store on the west side. It was a week before Christmas after World War 1. A tired looking woman came into the store and asked him for enough food to make up a Christmas dinner for her children. He asked her how much she could afford to spend.
She answered, "My husband didn't come back. I have nothing to offer but a little prayer."
This man confesses that he was not very sentimental in those days. A grocery store could not be run like a bread line.
So he said, "Write it on paper," and turned about his business.
To his surprise, the woman pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to him over the counter. She said, "I did that during the night, watching over my sick baby."
The grocer took the paper before he could recover from the surprise; then he regretted having done so, for what could he do with it? What could he say?
Then an idea suddenly came to him. He placed the paper without even reading the prayer on the weight side of his old fashioned scale. He said, "We shall see how much food this is worth."
To his astonishment, the scale would not go down when he put a loaf of bread on the other side. To his confusion and embarrassment, it would not go down though he kept on adding food - anything he could lay his hands on quickly, because people were watching.
He tried to be gruff, but he was making a bad job of it. His face got red, and it made him angry to be flustered.
So finally he said, "Well, that's all the scales will hold anyway. Here is a bag. You will have to put it in yourself. I am busy."
With what sounded like a gasp or a little sob, she took the bag and started packing in the food, wiping her eyes on her sleeve every time her arms were free to do so. He tried not to look, but he couldn't help seeing that he had given her a pretty big bag and that it was not quite full. So he tossed a large cheese down the counter, but he did not say anything. nor did he see the timid smile of grateful understanding which glistened in her moist eyes at this final betrayal of the grocer's crusty exterior.
When the woman had gone, he went to look at the scales, scratching his head and shaking it in puzzlement. Then he found the solution. The scales were broken. But as the years passed, he often though of it and wondered if that really was the solution. Why did the woman already have the prayer written to satisfy his unpremeditated demand? Why did she come at exactly the right time when the scale was broken? What confused him so that he did not notice it and kept piling on the food with only a scrap of paper in the weight pan? He had felt like a fool and hardly knew what he was doing.
The grocer is an old man now. his head is white, but he still scratches it in the same place and shakes it slowly back and forth with the same puzzled expression. he never saw the woman again, and come to think of it, he had never seen her before either. Yet, for the rest of his life, he remembered her better than any other woman in the world and thought of her more often.
He knew it had not been just his imagination, for he still had the slip of paper upon which the woman's prayer had been written: "Please Lord, give us this day our daily bread."
