Today’s author Prince of Peace’s Intentional Interim Pastor Steve Sylvester.

On my way home after worship on August 10, I stopped off to pick up some handlebars someone was selling on Facebook Marketplace.  The bars are for some upgrading I’m doing on my wife’s fat bike.  The woman who listed them explained that she was selling her home, but the buyer had just backed out.  She was also limping because of a toe she feared had been broken when she stubbed it while navigating through the boxes stacked in the living room.  Tough week.  Anyway, we chatted a bit, I paid her for the bars and headed home.

When I woke up on the morning of the 11th, I had a message from the seller on my phone.  She found a $10 bill on her driveway that was folded exactly as the $20 and $5 that she knew were from me, so felt confident it was mine.  She asked for my address so she could drop it off.  In the unhingedness of our present world, I received this as a message from God that all is not lost.

This experience reminded me of similar incident back in 2019.  My friend Bill and I were in the final week of a 2,000 mile bike tour, heading east towards home.  An advancing storm in eastern South Dakota or western Minnesota drove us to seek shelter in the late afternoon, so we pulled over at a ramshackle hotel at the roadside.  It looked like it had been shuttered for years, but as the rain started coming down harder, I grabbed my wallet and went to what I thought might have been the office.  The door was open, but the room was empty.  We got back on the bikes and pushed on.  Daylight was fading and it had been a long day, so when we saw a “real” hotel on the outskirts of another small town, we decided to stay there instead of camping.  And that’s when I discovered I had left my wallet 40 miles behind.

About a week after getting back home, I received a package in the mail.  It was my wallet.  My credit card, health card, license, etc. were in it, along with $89 in cash.  There was also a card with a note from the woman who found it.  My address and name were on the license, so she knew to whom and where to send my wallet, but she had also looked me up online.  She read that I was using the mileage of our ride to raise money for our congregation’s relationship with San Isidro Labrador, our partner congregation in Guatemala.  There was a $5 bill taped to the card, along with an apology that she was not able to contribute more.

Every day, if we look and listen, there is goodness out there in God’s world, and sometimes it even comes searching for us.