No, I still haven’t found my wedding ring, unfortunately. But two headlines from the news this week have definitely shown me that God is hard at work putting people in the right place to find what they need to find.
A Stuffed Monkey Comes Home
In 2009, Liam, a young boy from Nebraska, lost his much-loved stuffed blue monkey, Ah-ah, at Rocky Mountain National Park. Three years later, Liam’s mother was searching on eBay to buy a viola for Liam’s sister when she felt moved to type “stuffed blue monkey” in the search bar. Up came a picture of a monkey that looked just like the one Liam had lost, sold by a woman in Florida.
Liam’s mom bought it, hoping it could somehow comfort her son, even though it wasn’t the same one he had lost. Then it arrived and Liam’s mother opened up the box. She gasped. The hair on the monkey’s head was singed, burned somehow. The tag was jaggedly torn. This monkey was damaged.
Damaged the same exact way Ah-ah had been, before Liam lost it.
Liam’s mother gave Ah-ah to her son, who had no doubt it was his lost monkey. How it got from Rocky Mountain State Park to an eBay seller in Florida, we’ll probably never know. But I think we know how Liam’s mother was able to find it.
The Repeat Hero
Christopher Manacci and his wife were driving near Chagrin Falls, Ohio, on their way home from a Case Western Reserve University football game. They passed a van towing a boat and noticed that the driver was pulling over with a flat tire. Christopher dropped his wife at home and returned to the road to see if he could be of any assistance. He got out of his car and went over to talk to the driver of the van. The driver told Christopher he and his son were coming back from a fishing trip.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a speeding car flew toward them, clearly out of control. It smashed into Christopher’s car. If his car hadn’t been there, it would have rammed into the van, killing the driver and his son. The driver was allegedly drunk.
But that’s not all. ABC’s Good Morning America reports:
That was when a strange situation became even stranger. Gerald Gronowski, the owner of the van who was returning from a lake fishing trip, asked Manacci what kind of work he did. When Manacci replied that he is a nurse practitioner at Case Western’s School of Nursing, Gronowski recounted an incident that had taken place eight years earlier.
“He tells me about this story where he was fishing on that same lake,” Manacci said. “His son at that time was on the dock where you launch the boats and I heard him say, ‘Is anybody here a doctor?’ I was kayaking with my son on the lake. His son says, ‘My dad’s hurt really bad.’ I say, ‘Let me take a look at him.’ He had three [fishing hooks] deep in the palm of his hand, deep into the tissue of his hand. Fortunately, I had with me a medical kit to remove this hook out of his hand without causing any more extensive damage.
“He’s telling me this story and I go, ‘Yes, I know that story well.’ He looks at me and says, ‘You do?’ I say, ‘Yeah, it was me.”
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