In the Right Place at the Right Time

Yesterday, I got lucky, or rather, I was blessed, to be the right person at the right place at the right time so that I could be a blessing to others.

I slept in a little bit yesterday morning. I knew I'd have some time between my morning exercise and my first tutoring appointment, so I cut into that time by half an hour so I could rest for another half hour before catching the bus to school.

On my way to school, I saw someone I recognized: the man with the lunchbox, whom I often run into while waiting for the bus. That morning, he was going for a walk with his wife and kid. His wife, having walked a bit ahead, paused to let them catch up. But the place at which she stopped was in front of someone's driveway, and that someone was ready to leave.

Something I haven't mentioned about the man and his wife before, because it wasn't relevant before, is that the two of them seem deaf, and I am now confident that at least the wife is. I've never seen either of them communicate audibly, just with signs. And when the person whose driveway the wife was blocking asked her to move and even honked at her, she couldn't hear him and didn't notice him.

But I, having happened to notice their deafness in our previous interactions, and having tweaked my schedule slightly to have happened to be there at that moment, knew what was going on, and I was able to step in to help. I informed the driveway owner that the woman was deaf, nonverbally got the woman's attention, and directed her attention to the man in the car in the driveway behind her. She cleared the way, the man drove away, and I felt lucky to have been the right person in the right place at the right time.

It felt then, and it feels now, that God had been working through me to make that little miracle happen. This is odd because I hadn't felt like I was being directed. I had chosen to change my schedule that morning because I was tired and lazy, not because I got the impression that it was, for some reason, important to leave later than normal that day.

A similar "coincidence" had happened years ago when I had taken a stray pitbull to the pound and was able to adopt her a week later with timing that seemed too lucky to have been mere luck. I hadn't felt impressed to leave the dog at the pound; I was just doing what I had thought was the best thing to do, and by some miracle, I turned out to have been right. God had turned my mistake into a miracle, and yesterday morning, He turned my laziness into a miracle, too.

God is very good at working miracles through imperfect people. We make mistakes and bad decisions every day. And yet, more often than is probable, those mistakes can work out to somehow have been the best thing we possibly could have done. I'm grateful that God is pulling strings to make miracles out of the decisions we make, and that, regardless of where we go, what we do, or when we leave, we frequently (miraculously) tend to end up in the right place at the right time.