Spoiler alert! Dave is actually a contractor, not an angel - but the point of this blog is that God used him to meet a need I had even before I had any idea that I needed it.
Yesterday morning about 10am Becky and I went to Menard's in Morris and bought some tile for a kitchen backsplash. I paid for it, put the credit card into my billfold, and my billfold into my coat pocket with my gloves. We walked to the car, loaded the tile in and then headed for home.
A little after noon yesterday I saw a pickup pull into our driveway. Now, in the country we generally recognize people by the vehicle they drive (which for guys is usualy a pickup). But I didn't recognize this pickup - so off to the backdoor to greet whomever ... "What can I do for you?"
The fellow smiled, held up a billfold and said, "Today's your lucky day!" And he was right - it wasn't just someone's billfold. It was my billfold. "I'll bet you don't even know where you lost it." I told him I suspected it was when I was going out of Menard's. I asked him what his name was and he said "Dave". Just Dave, nothing else. He said he found the address on my driver's license but no phone number. So, he decided to drive out here on his lunch break and see if I was home. I told him thanks several times, but I think I was kind of stunned by God's intervention on my behalf before I even knew the billfold was missing.
Becky, Anne and I talked over at home last night and decided that a nice gift card to Amazon would be appropriate. This morning I printed one out and went to Menard's to find Dave and thank him again. I found the manager at the front and explained I was looking for the employee named Dave who had found my billfold yesterday and returned it to me. She looked puzzled - and then explained that there wasn't any Dave who worked there that fit my description. She confirmed that with another of the employees. And suddenly finding Dave had become a lot more difficult.
I drove back home, thinking about what I should do next. I decided that waiting would only make finding Dave more difficult. I would do the only thing I could think of: drive around the north end of Morris for a couple hours, looking for a pickup like Dave had been driving ... and ask God to help me find him.
I spent 20 minutes checking out parking lots north of I80 without seeing anything like Dave's pickup. So I decided to begin going through parking lots south of I80. As I was going past Morris Diner I saw a pickup toward the back that reminded me of the one Dave had been driving. I went around the block, came back and pulled into the Diner's parking lot. Sure enough, it was a contractor's vehicle - I could tell from the tools inside. So what's next - I guess I go in and have a look around the restaurant - staring at each of the patrons and seeing if any match my increasingly fuzzy memory of the previous day.
This is WAAAAYYYY out of my comfort zone!
I went in and the manager was at the cash register inside the front door. I explained to him that I was looking for the guy who had returned my billfold the day before and I had seen a pickup outside that was similar to the one he had been driving. Would it be okay for me to look through his patrons? Somehow the manager really got into it. He had me look through those on the north first. I looked at one fellow and said, "Dave?", but he shook his head. A cursory glance into the south half wasn't promising, but the manager said I should go right in and take a good look at the people eating there.
Among the patrons in the south half of the restaurant were six contractors gathered around two tables - clearly they had come in together. The one furthest from me looked kind of like the guy I had seen yesterday, so I walked toward him and asked if his name was Dave. "No," he said, "that's my dad". Then from behind me I heard a voice say, "Peter?!"
Yup, that was Dave. "How did you find me?" I explained that I had asked God to help me find him, so I could say thanks appropriately and I gave him the Amazon gift card containing the gift certificate. I don't think Dave had told the others about the billfold, because he explained what had happened and how he happened to find me.
It was good Dave found it and not someone else. He saw it lying on the ground in the Menard's parking lot. There was a fellow getting into a car near it and he said to him, "Excuse me, I think you've dropped your wallet. " The guy felt his pocket and said, "No, I've got mine." Then seeing the billfold on the ground he said, "... but I think it's my wife's." However, before that fellow could respond, Dave stooped down and picked up the wallet, which was very cold - a sure sign that it had been there for some time and was certainly not "the wife's" wallet.
Later Dave looked through he billfold for a phone number he could call, but found none. Online searches only offered phone number results for money. Checking the address he discovered it was only 10 minutes away, so he decided to take his lunch break to drive out to our farm and return the wallet to a stunned Peter Meyer.
Why in the world did God orchestrate this whole adventure? I have no doubt that I'm getting increasingly clumsy and a little dense in my old age, so it's not as if this kind of behavior on my part is novel. But why would God arrange to have it brought back and then honor Himself by helping me find Dave? I don't know. But as I was getting ready to leave Dave and his coworkers to finish their lunch, he said to me, "You have no way of knowing how much this means to me."
Angels are literally "messengers of God". So in that sense, Dave was an angel. But it also seems like God not only blessed me through this angel, but blessed the angel as well.
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