I used to love clothes shopping with my mom. We’d skip everything at the front of the store and head directly for the clearance racks. We’d find great bargains, which made the shopping so much more fun!

My four boys aren’t so much into shopping with me. When they were little, they hid in all the racks or tried to stand up in the cart, making my shopping experience more than a little bit stressful. As they got bigger, they just stood by the racks, bored out of their minds. “Do you like this shirt?” I’d ask. They’d answer with a blank stare. I gave up, deciding I’d just need to wait until they got married, then perhaps my daughters-in-law could go shopping with me.

But over the weekend, I actually experienced about twenty minutes of enjoyable Mother/Son shopping. (Yes, twenty minutes. Total. I know better than to push a good thing.)  We were in a city, and our oldest needed new indoor soccer shoes, so we briefly hit the mall.

We entered the athletic store, and saw that they had a total of two varieties of indoor soccer shoes. One pair was $55, the other $65. Not terrible for high quality shoes, it’s just that we have a lot of kids and they have a lot of feet and they play hard and it just all adds up. We told the salesman what we were looking for, and asked if these two varieties was all they had. He replied with a yes. And then as an afterthought he said, “Oh, except for whatever we have in the back on clearance. But those are for really big feet.” Um, hello? Have you seen my son’s feet? Big.  Show us the shoes!

Would you believe this? They had one pair of men’s indoor soccer shoes on clearance. One. And guess what size it was? Asa’s size. And guess how much it cost? Ten dollars. Seriously. Who has name brand, high quality shoes for a big footed boy for just 10 bucks? What a blessing. They fit perfectly. We were so excited.

That all happened within the first seven minutes. The rest of our time was spent at the clothing clearance racks I had found by the shoes. Everything was half off of the clearance price, which, if you can even believe it, got my two older boys excited about shopping with me. Long story short (20 minutes, remember?), we walked out of the store with a pair of shoes, two very nice hoodies, and a pair of high quality athletic shorts for less than the cost of the $55 shoes we had originally found when we walked in.

In conclusion: I shopped with two of my sons, and we all had fun. It may be a miracle. Let us all take a deep sigh and hold these memories in our hearts as they may never happen again.

Now your turn. Share what you’re thankful for!  Leave a comment on this post letting us know how God is working in your life. If you’ve written a blog post about what you’re thankful for, leave the link in the comments so we can visit your blog to read about it. We love sharing and reading about God’s blessings!