The Right Place

 

It started with a craving for cigarettes and diet Dr. Pepper.  Add an empty wallet and my reluctance to leave the house on a chilly afternoon and you have one of those situations I find myself in on a regular basis.  

My friend Clay was working on my shower, which has proven a challenge among many challenges in working on a century old farmhouse.  He mentioned that he was out of cigarettes, due in large part to the recalcitrant shower.  I said that I was out of diet Dr. Pepper and if he went to town for cigarettes, he could bring me one but that I didn’t have any money.  He said he didn’t have any money either.  The bank had closed and  he didn’t have a debit card.  I have a debit card, but I was not willing to leave my house and my fireplace.  It was a standoff and it appeared that no cigarettes or diet Dr. Pepper were in our future that Monday evening.

Clay went back to tinkering with the shower and I returned to my chair, where I was reading and listening to Christmas music.  Inexplicably, next thing I knew, I was going through my purse again, looking for money.  I found a lone dollar bill, then pulled out a handful or two of change.  I had wondered why my purse was so heavy.  Soon I had stacks of nickels, dimes and quarters that almost equaled cigarettes and diet Dr. Pepper.  Surely I could find a little more change around the house.  In the long ago days before ATMs, these searches were a common occurrence in my life and I knew all the places to look.

By the time Clay came back through the living room, I had rounded up enough change for a trip to the gas station that would satisfy our addictions.  We both laughed at how pitiful we were, but Clay scooped up the change and left for town, just at sunset.

He was gone what seemed like an extraordinarily long time for a three mile trip to the convenience store, and then the phone rang.  It was Clay.  “I need some advice,” he said.  He had encountered a mother and daughter in the parking lot of the gas station.  The mother was drunk.  Not just tipsy, but what we call around here knee-walking drunk.  Trying to start her car when it was already running drunk.  The daughter was, it turned out, 14 years old and when Clay asked her if she felt safe getting in the car, she said “No.”  So the drama began.

Clay said he noticed the car in the first place because it was a car like his and caused him a second look.  Then he saw clothes, pillows, blankets and other stuff piled in the back seat.  About that time, he observed the condition of the woman in the drivers seat.  “Are you all right?” he asked her.  “Do you need some coffee?”  It was abundantly obvious she was in no condition to drive.  Then the child came out of the store.  Further conversation brought out that the young girl wanted to go stay with her grandmother in Memphis, several hours away.  A phone call to the grandmother was the next step, and she said that she not only wanted her granddaughter there; she had been trying to get custody of her.  But she was eighty years old and could not drive halfway across the state in the dark to pick her up.  I was blank – I could not think of anything except the obvious, which was to call the police.  “I don’t see that you have any choice,” I said.  But what would happen to the child?  Here it was the week of Christmas and neither of us could bear the thought of her going to children’s services or worse.

Clay managed to get the woman to turn off the car and give him the keys and he told the child not to get in the car, whatever she did.  The police arrived and managed to get the woman to admit she had taken a Xanax on top of three beers.  I think everyone suspected that she was under-reporting the numbers.  Thankfully, another conversation with the grandmother changed things. A cousin was willing to drive her to collect her granddaughter.  Amid some tears, the young girl was allowed to collect some of her belongings from the car and the police took her to wait at city hall while they took the mother to jail. 

Clay came to the house before he went home and collapsed on my couch.  “I am not the right person to handle something like this,” he said. “All I wanted was a pack of cigarettes.”  I didn’t ask him how many of his cigarettes he had already smoked on the way home, but he did tell me later that he only had one left by the next morning.  Clay does not handle drama well.

“You were exactly the right person,” I said.  “You were in the right place at the right time.”  Offhandedly I added, “I’m glad I found all that change.”  It was at that moment that it hit me – now I understood why I had been compelled to gather up the money.  Something led me to put Clay, a very unlikely angel, in the path of that mother and daughter.  Maybe someone else would have noticed and intervened, but he was the one that did, and possibly saved a couple of lives.

Bottom line is, God can take the most ordinary, mundane things and make something divine.  Just like he took a manger in a dirty stable and turned it into a sacred space when time stood still on a long ago Christmas.  You just don’t know where you will find a miracle or what will lead you to be in that particular place just at that moment.  It can even be in the parking lot of a gas station on a cold Monday evening on a frivolous quest for cigarettes and diet Dr. Pepper.