On The Way Home

On my way home last night I stopped to help a very little and stooped over older lady with her shopping cart. It was one of those small carts that some people use, and she was using it for support and to hold some of her belongings, but it wasn’t very full or very heavy. She was having trouble navigating on the streets downtown – the area we were in is full of construction and the streets are so old that the infrastructure is terrible anyway. The sidewalks have been replaced in a lot of areas, but even they have been worn and affected by time and weather so they are uneven in places and dangerous even if you have good solid legs to walk on which this woman didn’t.

When I stopped to help her she was in the middle of the street trying to navigate her cart through some very cracked parts of the road, and when I offered to help her it was an easy thing to get her back onto the sidewalk again. But then she said that she was going to the same train station that I was going to, and I said that was where I was going too, and she asked if I could help her get there and what was I going to say? We were only about seven blocks away at most, but it was late and I was tired. I’d just come from teaching out on Staten Island and I wanted to get home. I’d been walking fast to make it home as quickly as possible, and I knew that even though it was a short distance, it would take us at least twice as long as it would have taken me. But what was I going to say? So I slowed down and walked with her and helped her all the way as much as she needed. She didn’t need much, just the company and a hand here and there and help with directions because she said she didn’t often take the train. What she was doing in that area at that time of night I’ll never know.

There are times when God will send people like that our way on purpose. She wasn’t horrible in any way, but she was not necessarily someone who I would have normally wanted to spend the next half an hour with, especially when I was already tired and just wanted to get home. She kept asking everyone, me included, what time it was every few minutes, and some people didn’t even respond to her because she really looked like someone who might have been homeless and possibly a little deranged. What they thought I was doing with her I can’t even imagine, but they didn’t acknowledge me at all. Maybe they took us both for two lunatics – it was a full moon after all.

When I say that God sent her on purpose, I don’t mean that He was playing any kind of game. He’s been giving me messages lately about giving time and care and love to people who may not be able to give anything back, and this was one of those times when He was seeing if I’d been listening to what He’d been telling me. There was no way I could say no to this lady – I know too much that when things like that happen I just have to go with it and if I do it will all work out fine. As it was when I got to the station, the tiny lady shrieked out at the Police Officers to asked them the time, and I asked them if they could help her get down the escalators and stairs into the station. They said they couldn’t, but then out of nowhere a young and very respectable looking woman appeared who knew the woman I was with, and she took care of her from there so that I could run down the escalator and get into my train which was waiting in the station. If I had gotten there earlier I would have been on the same train – or maybe I would have even missed it somehow because that’s how God works too. If we do what He wants us to do, He’ll always make sure we end up all right. He owns everything and He made time, so He can make things work out exactly the way He wants them to every time.

And who knows? This woman said she lives in Jersey City, and so did the other woman who appeared out of the blue. I may see them again one day or then again I may not. I’ve had it happen before that someone randomly appeared at some very strange and unexpected moment, and then later on I realized they weren’t really a person at all. Angels do walk on this earth, and these chance meetings can be about so much more than we can even realize. I’ve always loved Charles Dickens novels, and things like that really do happen. By some strange and unexpected course of events your life is forever changed, all because of someone you met on a bus or a train or out walking late at night in a city that never sleeps.

There was a verse for memorization in one of my email devotionals yesterday, one that I’ve heard many times before, but somehow it was just what I needed to hear. “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28) All things, not just some, but all, even those things that make no sense and that you’d rather not have happen, even those things that you don’t understand and don’t see a purpose for. It’s not in our understanding, but that doesn’t matter. God knows, and He understands, and He’s the one who works it all out.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan