So I've recently come home from a teaching conference in Columbus, Ohio. It was very interesting and useful, but it lasted until almost 1:00 on Saturday. Check out time at most hotels is 11:00, and so we had to put our bags in this special room that the hotel has to hold luggage while we attended the rest of the conference.
In order to ensure the security of our bags, the hotel keeps the room locked and a person inside of it and gives us tickets to match the ones they put on our bags. We are supposed to show these tickets to the person inside the room so that they can give us our bags back.
So I get my tag and put it in my pocket and we go to breakfast and then to the rest of the conference. Now, everyone knows we should not put things in our pockets if they are important and we don't want to lose them. Why I forgot this, I couldn't say, but I noticed during the last session of the conference that morning that I had lost my luggage ticket.
This was slightly worrisome because the hotel had made it very clear that they did not return bags unless the luggage ticket was produced. Still, I had no idea where I had lost the ticket and the conference was held in a convention center that was bigger than the school in which I teach. It could've been anywhere! Not only that, but it could've been in the hotel itself, at the restaurant where we'd had breakfast, or on the street between the hotel and restaurant. There was no way I could, by diligently searching, hope to come upon this lost ticket.
Since this was so thoroughly out of my control, I didn't worry overlong. I reasoned that the hotel would have to give me my bags eventually and we'd have to figure something out. Since my two favorite shirts were in that bag, I certainly hoped so!
So the conference ended and my friends from the school I teach at and I were deciding on where to go get lunch before we picked up our bags and headed to the airport. We tried the food court in the hotel, and found some moderately decent fast-food type restaurants. The rest of downtown Columbus seemed too much to walk in the frigid weather, so we had to decide whether we wanted to eat in the food court or walk to the restaurant right across the street where we'd had breakfast.
The more we talked about it, the more we wanted to return to the restaurant where we'd eaten breakfast earlier that day. We still hadn't claimed our bags yet, so we didn't have to drag them around with us.
When we got to the restaurant, the lady who seated us decided to seat us in the exact same spot where we'd eaten breakfast. She sat us there even though there was another option because one of my friends was in a walking boot since she broke her foot earlier this school year. It was there, next to the booth where we'd eaten breakfast, that I found my luggage ticket!
Happily surprised, but somewhat wondering if this could possibly be my exact luggage ticket, I put the paper in my zipped up backpack front pocket (see, I learned) and ate lunch. After that, we went back to the hotel and claimed our bags.
I was even more glad I'd found the ticket when the hotel clerk made a big show of checking our tickets before returning our bags to us. I also found that the number on my ticket matched exactly the number on the other half of the ticket that was attached to my bag.
Yahweh provides! Whether or not I spent the whole morning worrying about how I was going to get my luggage, He had that ticket there for me to find all along. In realizing that I had no control over finding that ticket, I saved myself hours worth of worrying and still found the ticket anyway.
Meanwhile, Yahweh proves Himself a faithful father once again, and I am thoroughly blessed.
No comments:
Post a Comment