A few days ago I went to town to do some shopping, and after a couple of hours was wandering back to my car, heavily laden and ready to head for home. Imagine my irritation at realising that I had no change for the car parking ticket. In this particular carpark it is necessary to redeem your ticket before returning to your car and it can only be done with cash. These days, of course, cash is starting to become a rare commodity because most shops just take cards so I had managed to get through a whole session of shopping without reminding myself that I had no coins or notes to use to release myself and my car from the concrete multi-story.
I paused in the middle of Debenhams and tried to work out a way to sort out the ticket problem without walking the half-a-mile back to the cash point where I wasn't sure I would be able to remember my PIN number in order to release the much needed money. At the beginning of the shopping period a quick walk would not have been an issue, but now I was tired and wanted sit down and I was carrying several heavy bags that were starting to cut into my skin.
Alas, I could not think of any way to make a quick exit so started to trudge back gloomily to the cash point, annoyed with myself and my bad fortune.
Thankfully I did manage to dredge my PIN number from the back of mind and was able to make my way back to the car park, this time with cash, and redeem my parking ticket. At this point something happened that has never happened to me before in the many times I have paid my dues at the automated ticket machines. A lady at the machine next to me pressed a button which allowed her to speak to the caretakers of the car park and explained apologetically that she was without cash and couldn't pay for her ticket. The response from the disembodied voice was, unsurprisingly, to tell her to go and find a cash point and get some money out. This idea obviously appealed even less to the lady than it did to me and she asked falteringly if she could just give him the coins she had now and come back and pay the rest the next time.
This is where our lack of community lets us down. Fifty years ago in a small town the car parking attendant would have known most of his patrons at least by sight, if not by name, and would probably have been willing to be more helpful. Clearly the disembodied voice had not the slightest intention of being accommodating. This was probably the tenth time that week that somebody had made some excuse for not paying and he was not about to be sympathetic to a forgetful middle-aged lady who didn't have the energy to go looking for cash.
Of course by this time I had a purse full of change, so it was an easy matter for me to ask the lady how much money she needed (£1) and give it to her so that she could redeem her ticket and go home. A very small kindness which cost me very little but made her life, and the car parking assistant's for that matter, run a little more smoothly.
Shortly afterwords I realised that had I not myself forgotten to get cash and have to return for it I would never have been in a position to help this lady. There had been no one else there at the time to hand over the £1 she needed. I had been irritated and inconvenienced a little bit in order to help someone else (and who knows whether there would have been "wheels within wheels" for this lady and the inconvenience would have been much greater).
I wrote earlier about synchronicity or providence and how God can use even unpleasant events in our lives to take us a step closer to happiness, fulfillment, spiritual growth or whatever you want to call it. It's easy to rely on "tunnel vision", to have a blinkered view of our life which sees only what's right in front of us and not where this is taking us in the long-term. It had not occurred to me today that I might be put "out of my way" not to aid my own life but someone else's. In this instance the irritation and the help were both small issues, but the moral remains the same when it is applied to a much bigger event, both in terms of personal pain and of the good we may have the opportunity to bring about.
Photo courtesy of Cute Overload.
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