“Vacation is a two-week-long experience where money and time race against each other until both are totally exhausted.”
Stealing Dresses
Judge: “You admit breaking into the dress shop four times?”
Defendant: “Yes, your honor.”
Judge: “What did you steal?”
Defendant: “A dress, Your Honor.”
Judge: “One dress? And yet you admit breaking in four times!”
Defendant: “Well, your Honor, you see the first three times my wife didn’t like the color.”
Big Date
A young man called his mother and announced excitedly that he had just met the woman of his dreams. Now what should he do?
His mother had an idea: “Why don’t you send her flowers, and on the card invite her to your apartment for a home- cooked meal?”
He thought this was a great strategy, and a week later, the woman came to dinner. His mother called the next day to see how things had gone.
“I was totally humiliated,” he moaned. “She insisted on washing the dishes.”
“What’s wrong with that?” asked his mother. “I think it’s a wonderful gesture.”
“We hadn’t started eating yet.”
“I am with you, declares the Lord.”
- Haggai 1:13
I was having lunch with friends the other day, when one of them referred to an event in his life as providential. “We all have those watershed moments,” one of the guys responded, and we all agreed.
I shared one such experience that took place while I was in the Army. After basic training it was discovered that I could type, so the military made me a clerk-typist (never mind that I had written for newspapers while in high school and college) and sent me to Hawaii for a year and a half of service. On our way to the islands, three buddies and I were waiting at a bus stop outside San Francisco.
“Shipping out?” a sergeant standing nearby asked. I answered that we were going to Hawaii. That was his last stop, he told us, inquiring about our assignments. When I told him that the Army had turned me from a writer to a typist, he laughed and told me that he was a newspaper editor
“When you get to Hawaii, call this number. Tell him the Gray Fox sent you.” I took down the number but doubted anything would come of it. I was wrong. That “chance” meeting at a bus stop and my subsequent phone call produced a writing job that suited my skills to a T and changed my whole time in the service. Providential? I think so.
Teach us, Lord, to trust Your hidden hand, leading in ways we may not understand.
Fred Bauer