Let me tell you what it is like to live my life.
I went to hang out with a friend last night. This is a normal, ordinary occurrence that should not have turned into A WHOLE THING. But it did. It did turn into A WHOLE THING because I am a magnet for somehow blowing ordinary situations into overly complicated incidents. This is the theme of my entire life. It’s just like that story in the Bible where Mordecai says to Esther, “Perhaps you were created for such a time as this.”
(It’s nothing like that.)
This was my first time meeting Lisa at her actual house, as opposed to our usual stay-at-home mom meeting places: Starbucks or Chick-Fil-A. We’re not basic. And yes, I am admittedly very bad at directions. But mostly I blame this on the state of Georgia, which assigns three to four different names to a single street. Some of them aren’t even names, they are just dashes and numbers. I did not have this problem when I lived in Canada for a spell in college. When I lived in Canada streets were named like this: 1st Street, 2nd Street, 3rd Street, etc.
So I blame Georgia because sometimes I still get turned around trying to get to the mall in my own hometown and I never once got lost in Canada BECAUSE I CAN COUNT.
Anyhow, I was on my way to Lisa’s house how but I missed my turn on a busy stretch of highway during rush hour because of terrible signage and so it took me almost twenty minutes just to turn around.
AND THEN I MISSED IT AGAIN GOING THE OTHER DIRECTION.
When I finally found her street I was almost forty five minutes late. Except that once I was on her street I could not seem to locate her actual house. None of the house numbers matched the address I had.
Three houses on the street did not have numbers on them at all. The only one that fell into the right number order between the other houses had several large BEWARE OF DOG signs tacked on the garage doors, where the homeowners had also blacked out the garage door windows with spray paint. It was not a look that said “Welcome, lost person, please come knock on our door.”
Plus, I was pretty sure my friend did not have a scary dog. Or a dog at all, actually.
You might be thinking to yourself, “Self, why didn’t she just call Lisa or look it up on her smartphone because it is 2016?” Which would have been a great plan except that also I forgot my cell phone. I am so good at life skills.
By this time I was an hour late. But I was committed. So I finally decided to knock on the door with an 8 in the address, thinking that maybe I just wrote it down wrong when I wrote 3. Sometimes handwriting is hard. I really felt very old-fashioned knocking on a stranger’s door to ask for directions, like maybe I should use some sort of accent or something.
Spoiler alert: It was not her house.
And the nice man who lived there told me no one with kids even lived on that street at all.
Because I enjoy having awkward very logical conversations with strangers what I said was, “Are you sure? Have you ever seen her maybe just walking around the neighborhood? I mean, I don’t know if she just wanders around the neighborhood but her name is Lisa and she has three kids and she is really cute and tall and blonde?”
And would you even believe that the random house I stopped at happened to be someone who knew exactly who my friend Lisa was even though, as it turns out, she does not even live in that neighborhood at all?
She lives one neighborhood over. Apparently, even though they are totally separate neighborhoods, they both have a main street with the same name, only one is Made Up Name Drive and one is Made Up Name Lane. When I plugged her address into my Google Maps to print out because I like to party like it’s 1999, it sent me to the first neighborhood even though was no address with a 3 in that one. This is why I need a GPS system in my actual car. I arrived for our dinner date close to two hours after our agreed upon meeting time.
(The next book I am going to write is going to be called “How To Win Friends and Influence People.”)
But of all the houses that I could have stopped at, I happened to knock on the door of the one house who shares the back fence across both neighborhoods with my friend. And actually knows her. I do not know the people that I share a back fence with in my same neighborhood. I know that I have called the cops on them because they enjoy playing Justin Bieber loudly while partying on their back deck at 3am on a Tuesday. I am not even being facetious about that, that is the literal truth. That is the extent to which I know the people who live behind me.
So really, it was quite providential.
And it made me think about how for all our wandering, we’re never really lost. God always knows where we are, even when we aren’t certain, and life is filled with good people prepared to point us in the right direction.
Sometimes we just have to stop and ask for help to find what it is we’re looking for.
