Silveryside: The Crossing

Meaningful pretirement can bring freedom, like doing nervy acts that leave people scratching their heads. Also called prayerfully-directed chutzpah or boldness. Otherwise, healing acts like when Jesus brazenly rubbed spit mud on a blind man's eyes, could seem rude or overly dramatic (The Bible, John Chapter 9). Jesus walked in prayer, so the events of each of His days were ordered. 

Here is one of my modern-day mud rub stories, which I label The Crossing (guard). Preserved skills, learned during 6th grade crossing guard days at Washington Elementary School, have re-surfaced in the last few months for two spotty return engagements. The second experience begs a detailed explanation.

“Oh, thank you! Thank you!” says the petite, salt-&-pepper Asian lady standing next to me on the curb of a busy Philly intersection as I point to a car crossing the intersection. She thinks I saved her (maybe so, maybe not), by gently stopping her from crossing the street after the pedestrian signal appeared. She hadn’t looked to see the white vehicle that seriously ran a red light and was about to drive past us or at us if we had chosen to step off the curb to cross the one-way street. Just another interesting trip to Philly, grasping for weekly pretirement purpose. Now it’s time to safely ride the 6:36 p.m. train home with hubby.

So, on the train ride home there is time to ponder the book I read just today, with a story of God using the prayer of an evangelist to heal a blind man. It was a true miracle, and as I read that story I wondered if God could use my prayers to heal someone... and maybe He did, but in a different way. Which is more of a miracle? For a disabled person to be healed by prayer, or by prayer prevent someone from needing prayer in the first place? Maybe that lady at the busy intersection was spared injury by defensive means.

This back story to Paragraph One is the reason for my question:

The initial plan was to ride the train to Philly on Wednesday, but plans changed. I managed to miss Wednesday's 10:36 a.m. train and was bummed. On the tearful 20-minute return drive home, I briefly wondered if there was a reason why, through a series of parking circumstances (that could never be replicated), I missed that train. I decompressed and walked through how to correct the parking fumble, to hopefully not do it the next trip or ever again.   

Maybe Thursday or Friday would work to go to Philly. Fortunately, the two bedrooms in our new home, that still needed attention after our recent move, benefited from missing that train. 

Thursday came and went, with no time for Philly. And Friday's garage sale had me wondering whether or not Philly could be squeezed into afternoon plans. At 7:30 a.m. sharp I was open for business, ready to give free cupcakes to the first six customers and sell our dining table and everything. I waited. And waited. And had time to re-read the supernatural healing story in the book mentioned above. No customers whatsoever came, for 2 hours, so there was no need to stay open. Again I cried, this time because of a garage sale fail. Actually, it was a mega-fail. (A couple of hours later I discovered that my Craigslist post vanished, plus the sign at the end of the street that I thought was rudely taken down in reality fell down.)

Both Wednesday's outing and the garage sale had failed, yet I was determined to succeed at something this week! So as simple and unimportant as it might seem, that something was to get to Philly! It is a planned weekly silvery adventure I look forward to, and weekday options for the week had run out. It seemed poetic that since the train left me high and dry on Wednesday, randomly I wasn't asked to pay for Friday's train ride (nice). After arriving to the Philly train station, as always, the restroom was the first stop, then off to infamous busy Market Street (Facebook friends know that I have history there). Two or three lights later...

This recently-getting-used-to-staying-at-home silverweight might be grasping at straws, but if I hadn't failed to catch the train Wednesday, and if Friday's garage sale hadn't been a total flop (giving time to re-read some of the book that encouraged the prayer), with a stop at the train station's bathroom even though it was out of habit rather than urgency; and if discouragement kept me from putting one foot in front of the other... with all that happened this week to get me to that busy Philly intersection Friday at approximately 3:45 p.m. to stand next to that older stranger, with an ideal vantage point to see her and Mr. Lawless simultaneously, close enough to naturally stop the lady's forward motion. Maybe all of the events wove together to keep her from stepping into a scary situation. 

And the icing on the cupcake, to pause and punctuate a highly convoluted week plus that morning's book take-away, was an unexpected, complimentary one-way train ride into the city. Free always gets our attention! Some may call Friday's event random or over-rated, but because of odd circumstances and seeming fails that seamlessly combined together to orchestrate it, and the added 40-minute train ride home in the "quiet car" to do little more than ponder (no chatting allowed or you get shhhsh'd), I feel obliged and compelled to not downplay it, and to label it a rather-ish? miracle.

Recently freed from its protective chrysalis
a beautiful monarch butterfly's in-flight random
photo backdrop: An elementary school

God can partner uniquely with anyone. So whatever our stage in life, pray for opportunities. And be prepared to take pondering time to see the miracles and be humbled.