Yesterday at my church services, one of my church friends shared such a fun story, in a talk she gave to the congregation. I’m going to call this friend Jane. Her story involves a game show I’d never heard of. It’s called Cross Wits. Jane said that when she was a young adult, living in the Los Angeles area, she watched this show every weekday with her parents. She did this while going to college. As she played the game along in her living room, her parents noticed she was very good at it. So, her parents encouraged her to audition for the show. She ended up getting on. She said that she took second place, winning a year’s supply of peanut butter, a dining room furniture set, and a few other odds and ends. What was more remarkable was that she developed a crush on the first-place winner, who I will call Jack Rogers. She found that this guy was in law school at the same university where she was an undergrad studying English lit.

So, with her heart all a flutter, Jane decided to start walking through the law school building every day instead of around it when she went to class. Lo and behold, who should she happen to discover but Jack. They ended up eating lunch together, which she said, wasn’t as romantic or expensive as it sounds because they had each brought a lunch and just decided to sit together while eating lunch.

She kept hoping he would ask her out on a date, but he never did. Her romantic fantasies continued, for several months, as she wondered how she could get him to date and fall in love with her.

One day, on a Saturday morning, out of the blue, on a whim, her father proposed that the family take a two-hour drive to go to the San Diego Zoo. This was completely uncharacteristic of Jane’s family. Usually such a trip took days to plan and always happened in the morning, not in the middle of the day. But, for some odd, inexplicable reason, the family went on this spontaneous trip anyway.

Imagine how surprised Jane was to discover her crush appear round a corner while she was visiting the zoo. He was with a female, who Jane learned was his new wife. Jane found out that Jack had taken his new wife to Mexico for their honeymoon, using the first-place prize trip he had been awarded on Cross Wits. Jack said that the trip was horrible and launched into all the reasons why. Meanwhile Jane felt disappointed that he was married, but inwardly, smugly satisfied that the honeymoon was a disaster.

Jane’s father did not believe in God. He solely used reason to guide and explain his life, never faith. Jane said that anything others attributed to inspiration or the hand of God, he called coincidence. On the trip home, he repeated over and over, “Wasn’t that amazing that we happened to see Jack Rogers at the zoo?!”

Jane, who did and does believe in God, smiled to herself. She said that the knew that God had inspired her dad to take the family on this trip to the zoo, because God knew that Jack would be there. God knew Jane’s heart. He knew she needed to put this fantasy of fulfilling a crush to rest. In her talk at church yesterday, pointed out that all good dads everywhere, whether church-going or not, whether God-believing or not, can be inspired by God, to help their children. Her dad was a good dad, she said, and he was inspired to bless his daughter in that way, that day.

I love it! It reminded me of how the week before, when I was wanting to take a three-day mountain cabin family getaway to celebrate our family’s birthday, my plans got frustrated. I found out my daughter had signed up for a work shift. So, our three-day getaway got shortened to two days. But God worked it out for my good, as that night, my oldest child, who lives in TX, surprised us by walking into our home without previous notification while we were watching the movie I had planned to watch while at the cabin. If we had been at the cabin, we would have missed him. Earlier that week, in a family group text message, I had announced a Zoom family birthday party to my out-of-the nest children. I was about to tell them we would be at the cabin while I conducted the Zoom party but stopped short. Something told me not to tell them about being at the cabin. Now I know why! God is good! He can communicate with us on a day-to-day, even moment-to-moment basis. It is up to each of us to fine-tune the skill of receiving His communication.