Pierre M.

Eade

I dropped my family off at the front of the Minor League Baseball stadium to meet another family we were joining for the game. I proceeded to drive our minivan to the nearby parking garage.  As soon as the van was parked, I ran out of the garage to meet back up with everyone.

Halfway there, I stopped in my tracks and dropped my hands to my front pockets. Instead of finding the reassuring feeling of my family’s five tickets in my pocket, I felt nothing but lint. With the speed of a Wild West gunslinger, my hands instinctively flipped to my back pockets. They not only lacked tickets, they didn’t even have lint! The feeling of nervous perspiration began to cover my brow. In shock and unbelief, I did a double check, front pockets, back pockets, still, no tickets.

My feet made a 180-degree pivot and I ran back to the van to search for our tickets. I looked everywhere and found nothing. I decided to run back to the stadium figuring I must have given the tickets to my wife. Practically ignoring our friends, I looked to my wife, “Do you have our tickets?” Her honest and curt “No”, was certainly not the answer I was hoping to hear.

Our friends' tickets were being held at the will call counter under my name. I approached the counter, asked for the tickets for my friend’s family and was about to try and finagle getting another free five tickets.  My sweet Christian business negotiator mode was so totally on.

As I was getting the words out of my mouth to ask for some comp tickets, my wife tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Some man just offered me five free tickets.” She was now holding the tickets in front of me. That random guy walked away never to be seen again. 

What happened to me that night reminds me of the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand. “When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?”  He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.” (