If you watch the news, you are keenly aware of how horror and anger and vulgarity get all of the press. But all of us have those little stories to tell of weird coincidences or happy encounters that give you a sense of fulfillment and hope.
This past week, was a good one for many people I know. It began with a broken window. My parents live in a nice, but not particularly friendly neighborhood. It has always saddened my mother that she only knows one neighbor and she has lived in the area for more than 20 years. The other day, she found their living room window had been shattered. It would cost them $155 to replace it.
My parents thought it might have been the young boy next door, but they didn’t want to point any fingers falsely. Without accusing the boy, my father showed the window to the boy’s mom. The next day, the dad showed up at my parent’s doorstep. He thought the glass might have been broken with a BB gun pellet and since the window was facing only their home, he figured it might have come from his direction. Even though he was not sure if his son had done it, he gave my parents a check to replace it.
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PAYING IT FORWARD
When my friend’s neighbor lost her horse to old age, my friend offered her own horse for riding. My friend’s husband and kids thought it was strange to share a horse, but my friend didn’t think twice about it. The neighbor would miss her horse, but now she could help care for my friend’s.
And then early one morning, my friend lost her phone at the beach. It had fallen out of her waist pack as she rode her bike along the strand. Up until that moment, it had been a great day. She had seen pelicans dive-bombing for fish and dolphins swimming so near in the ocean she could practically touch them. But when her phone disappeared, a cloud came over her. She searched for it along the sand, the sidewalk, parking lot, to no avail. She went home, depressed that she had to buy another phone, hoping nobody would hack into all of her personal information.
But then her neighbor called her. “I know where your phone is!” she said.
A woman walking along the beach had found it on the sand. As she picked it up, my friend’s neighbor happened to be calling to see if she could ride the horse. The lady who found the phone made plans with the neighbor to drop it off at my friend’s house and my friend had her phone back by lunch time.
That same week, a childhood friend posted a message on her Facebook page.
She had just signed the closing papers on her house in Arizona and was planning to pack up her kids and move back in with her parents. It was a bittersweet moment for her because she was leaving a life she had made for herself and her family and returning to her childhood home in California. As she walked out of the office where she had signed the papers, she sighed and hoped she had done the right thing. But just as she looked up, a car blazed by with her favorite verse from the Bible written on the back window telling her: don’t worry, you have hope and a future.
LOOKING FOR THE ONE
And then there was the man with the beagle. His mother had recently died and left him with the puppy. Since he lived in an apartment he could not keep it so he drove to the pound, resigned to the reality that the dog would have to be given away. But he couldn’t do it. He came back to the pound. He couldn’t do it. On his third trip, my friend happened to be in line waiting to adopt a dog. She saw the beagle and determined that this was the dog she had been looking for. The man handed her over and thanked her for not making him leave her.
“This couldn’t have made me more happy,” he said.
“This will be one happy dog,” my friend promised.
