The Grace of a Lost Wallet, Part II

God always answers my prayers but rarely in the way I expect or intend when asking. My lost wallet is a great example. Mind you, I never did ask for any help with that wallet. I just went on with my life and figured it would find its way home or not. But first, before I can continue with this story, I will have to direct you to the previous post about the wallet, or the follow-on details will make no sense. So, have a look here (The Grace of a Lost Wallet), then continue below.

Now, while I did not pray about that lost wallet, I did pray about something else. Earlier in the day, I had taken a Super Shuttle ride from Dulles Airport to my Washington office in Arlington, Virginia. The driver was a friendly guy, and when he found out that I did not have a ticket and the shuttle was going to leave in a few minutes, he personally walked me through the convoluted path to the ticket counter and back. Nice guy. Arab, I believe. It took nearly an hour to reach my office in the DC rush hour traffic, during which I added to the five hours of sleep I had just gathered on the red-eye from California, dozing during most of the trip in to town. I had no luggage, and I was the first person off the shuttle. So, I hopped off, with a thank you to the driver, who graciously wished me a good day.

As I entered the building, it slowly dawned on me that Super Shuttle is a taxi and not a company-supplied van, which I usually take but could not this time because the trip came at such short notice, given my early hour of arrival. I should have tipped the driver. I headed back out the door, just as the driver re-started the van and pulled out of the driveway. Feeling a bit stingy over the matter, I asked God to take care of the driver that day and see to it that he got good tips. I felt confident that as a result of that prayer the driver would indeed have a good-tip day.

The rest of the day was filled with successful meetings, at the end of which I grabbed a hotel taxi back to the hotel since our company van was occupied with taking the CEO to Regan National Airport to catch a flight to another of our locations. I returned to Dulles, where I discovered the loss of my wallet. Fortunately, I do not keep my credit cards in my wallet, and so I had my company card to pay the cab driver -- and, this time, to include a tip. The rest of the wallet story is in my previous post.

I arrived home early Friday morning from my redeye and went in to work. I had sent an enote to someone in the Washington office to check in the conference room for my wallet, which is the only place I remembered having opened my purse. Waiting for me was her reply: she had looked everywhere but had seen no wallet. So, all those other options as to who might find it and what s/he might do remained open.

I did not have to wait long. During a morning meeting, my phone rang. I glanced at the number: an unknown 240 number. So, I let voice mail take the call. After the meeting, I called voice mail. There was a man, who called himself Amr, speaking with a distinctively Arabic accent, saying that I had dropped my wallet in the Super Shuttle van. He had been the driver (whom I had not tipped). He wanted to return the wallet to me and asked for me to return his call.

I was about to return Amr's call when the phone rang again. This time it was Amr's supervisor, who was a native speaker of English. He had given the wallet to her and asked her to call because he thought perhaps I was not able to understand Arabic-accented English. (Little did he know how much time I have spent with people who speak Arabic-accented English!) The supervisor told me that my checkbook was in there (had forgotten about that), along with the business cards that had my coordinates so that they knew whom to call, stamps, and $56 in cash. Yep, that is exactly as it should have been. She offered to fedex the wallet to me. I told her to use some of the cash in the wallet for fedex and give the remainder of the money to Amr. She was surprised and said that Amr did not expect that but would obviously be pleased.

So, God did answer my prayer. Amr did have a good-tip day. As with so many of my answered prayers, I could not have predicted the outcome that I, the one who had not tipped him, would ultimately be the one to provide the good-tip day for Amr. Moreover, it was not even an expenditure for me because my per diem would be double that. I had taken about half of my per diem from an ATM just to have some money for meals. However, because I was all day with the CEO, my office provided all the meals, and I am allowed to keep the per diem. So, Amr made nearly $50 on a tip, and I made nearly $50 on per diem post-tip. Win-win. I could never have planned that, let alone even thought of an outcome of this nature. I have reached the conclusion that I don't ever want God to answer my prayers in the way I anticipate because His ways are always so much better than I can dream up!

I just love watching the many ways, so often unusual, in which God sprinkles His grace onto all of His children! Amazing!

Blest Guest Wednesday #13: Break Out the Red Pen! (Kathleen Smith)

At times, my crazy travel schedule interferes with my ability to post regularly, and I have to bring a little sanity to the blogging part of my life by asking for help. I am now entering one such crazy period. Some wonderful fellow bloggers have been willing to write guest posts for me on Wednesdays, hence the name "Blest Guest Wednesday."

As today's "Blest Guest," I asked Kathleen Smith (Heart 2 Heart), who comments on Blest Atheist frequently, to share something she thought would be interesting to BA readers. I think you will find her post interesting, so here goes:

Break Out the Red Pen!

When I was a corporate trainer for one of the top communications companies, after we had completed our 6 to 7 week New Hire training class, we had a graduation day. It was something I felt was owed to these hard working individuals who had made it through training for customer service representatives. They had to endure long hours and no time off for illness or any reason. If they did, we had to let them go due to the intense and compacted training they needed to do the job.

So, we usually had a class of about 40 people, and we were lucky to have 15 left by the close of our 6-week class. So, on graduation day, I would give them a chance to provide feedback on my training, being as honest as they felt, and no names needed to be provided. I wanted the brutal honesty. If I was a bad trainer, I wanted to know it but also what they felt I did wrong and suggestions on how to improve my training.

It was something I looked forward to the most. Most of what I got was great, but occasionally I did get the brutally honest feedback. I feel it made me a better person. I wasn’t out to get the person who gave it to me, rather, I felt that others can sometimes see things you are often too close to see. That’s where I believe we can all use some brutal honesty.

However, I think we have to be in the mood to hear it. Sometimes others want to offer their dose of brutal honesty to us, but we aren’t ready to hear it. I think a warning is in order. You have to mentally be prepared to deal with their honesty. You have to see it also for what it is: honest feedback based on their perceived opinion of you at that moment. It is a hard pill to swallow for some of us. We don’t want to hear anything negative. All we look for is praise and compliments.

It’s like the red pen circling our errors we have made in life. Remember when you received your paper back from your teacher in school, only to find it riddled with red-pen marks of correction? How did you handle it? If you were like me, a perfectionist in every sense of the word, I hated it. I didn’t see until my high school years that it was a way to improve, a way to better yourself, a way to be a better person to those around you.

In high school, I looked forward to the red-pen marks. I was always looking for how to be a better person, and the people, who could provide that kind of feedback for me were the experts in their field, my teachers. Who better to provide feedback and correction on my English paper than my English teacher? My parents could offer some suggestions, but unless they had an English degree, I had to wait for the red pen! I knew I was getting better when the red pen marks became so few that they didn’t appear any longer.

I didn’t know then but I do now how those red pen marks made me a better student. It’s all about not so much pointing out the negative things but on how to improve on the positive things. That is where God spends so much loving time with us.

Many times we are faced with similar situations in life. Times where I believe, God breaks out the red pen in our lives. Sometimes we are so stubborn that we choose to look at a difficult situation God has placed in our life, and all we choose to see is the red pen all over our paper. We don’t want to go back and fix it; we don’t want to hear what is wrong. We simply want to see a great grade on top and move on to something else.

When we take that attitude of refusing to fix things that God wants us to fix, He may allow the situation to pass but brings it back to us in a different form.

Many times as a teacher for my daughter, when she gets frustrated learning something new and wants to quit rather than see the lesson before her, I try again. Many times, I have to see that my attitude or method of teaching her that new concept isn’t getting through to her. I have to change my approach so she learns without me losing my patience with her or having her end up in tears. I have to try a different way of teaching her that concept. My methods weren’t able to reach her in the manner I needed it to, so she was missing the point. The goal is to get her to learn something new, something that will make her a better student and move up a level.

God is the same. He presents situations to us, many times in different manners so we can learn what He needs us to before we can move up another level. We may get frustrated and cry. We may run from our situation, but God keeps lovingly bringing it back to us until we see that situation or red pen for what it is: a lesson to be learned, a way to make us into the wonderful person God sees. It is His goal for us. We are on that path to becoming better people! We simply must change our hearts and our attitudes and be willing to see the red pen marks for what they are in our life.

God, please continue to use the red pen until I achieve all you want me to be in Your life!