Answers to prayers come in all shapes and sizes, sometimes when you’re not even aware that you’ve said that prayer. Maybe it’s something you wished for, something you held in your mind.
My wife, Carol Wallace, is a dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile and I come pretty close to it. Lately we’ve been watching the British TV series Downton Abbey, all about a British earl, his family and his American heiress wife in pre-World War I England.
The series is catnip for Carol because years ago she co-authored a book called To Marry an English Lord, an anecdotal history of that turn-of-the-last-century phenomenon when American heiresses trolled English waters for British aristocrats. The lords needed cash to repair ancient roofs while the American ladies were glad of titles to give them patina.
The screenwriter Julian Fellowes has done a capital job of capturing the era, upstairs and downstairs. So far only the first seven episodes have aired in America but Britain is launching new episodes. Because of that, an article appeared last weekend in the Daily Telegraph profiling Fellowes. Turns out To Marry an English Lord was a source of inspiration. Carol was thrilled.
“You should write him,” I said. “Tell him how grateful you are.”
“I would love to,” she said, “but how can I find his address?”
There was the prayer, or at least the unspoken prayer. How would we find Julian Fellowes’ English address? A friend of ours often quotes her mom’s dictum: “What you hold in your mind you meet in the marketplace.” That too could be a description of prayer.
Yesterday on my way home from work, heading across 34th Street, I passed a good friend and her friend who happens to work for a British charity. (She also happens to be a minister’s wife, but that doesn’t figure here.) Thanks to Facebook, both women knew of and mentioned Carol’s six-degrees-of-separation connection to Downton Abbey.
Then out of the blue my friend’s friend said, “You know, I actually have Julian Fellowes’ address.” Bingo. Just what we’d been looking for.
OK, it’s not a big deal, but such little connections always reinforce my desire to keep the big connections going. I rushed home to Carol and said, “You’ll never guess what I have.” The answer to her query.
