Messages: Timing

We think a lot about the Lord’s timing of stuff lately…

We are approaching the hottest, most humid months of the year and our A/C in the pickup quits. To say we were unhappy would have been an understatement and we had to wonder about the Lord’s timing. But Ralph took the truck over to a little place near here called Dakota and tried to find out what the damage was going to be. In the process he met a great family. They own and run the business and one of the sons that was working on our truck just works there as a stress reliever. So what’s his other job? Air Traffic Controller at the Mazatlan Center!! Yep, I’d say recharging air conditioning units on cars would be much less stressful than that. Ralph learned a ton about air traffic control while waiting for the truck to be fixed, such as the Mazatlan Center controls all traffic from the border to here, and actually monitors all traffic for all of Mexico. Pretty interesting. Every day here is educational in some way and there is another great family in our little community here that we know a little bit about and we got a bargain on the repairs too. Praise the Lord.

When our friends Grant and Ronna were here a month ago they left us with a bag full of little stuffed piggies for one of the orphanages here. We’ve been so busy with school, church and company that we haven’t had the time to take it over there. So we decided (do we ever decide or does God just do it for us?) today was the day. We got there just in time to greet Sister Ofelia and visit with her for a little bit. She was thrilled with the stuffed toys and as we were talking a little one awoke from a nap…just happened to be Jesus Andres. Cutest little boy you’d ever like to meet. So a gift sent from the US because of the love of Jesus arrived at the moment a little guy named Jesus was there to receive it. He happily accepted a little piglet and was excited at the great gift. You should have seen his face!!! Timing indeed can be everything.

And you know that our ceiling fans in both the upstairs bedrooms were broken when we moved in…one of them fixed by Genaro, Jr a couple of months back. But we hadn’t gotten around to fixing the other for lack of time…but with my cousins coming for a visit we thought we’d better get cracking and get the parts and take a stab at it ourselves. The landlady had already given the go-ahead to us so it was just a matter of timing. Finally we went to get the requisite blades and brackets and returned home only to discover that we also needed some of the tiny little screws to mount the brackets to the motor unit. So back out to get those six little screws. Alas…the store didn’t have them because, get this, they come with the units when they are sold. Guess they don’t want to have you repairing them, only replacing them!!

Undaunted we wandered around with our little sample screw trying to find something we could substitute or adapt in some way, and if you know us intimately you will know how truly funny this is. Handy we are NOT. But in the store, in the ceiling fan section, was a ceiling fan salesman putting together display models of ceiling fans to be put up in the store to entice people to buy. We explained our dilemma and he dipped into his tool box and dug around and found six spare screws of the right size and gave them to us…free!! Timing is everything. A different day or different hour we would have missed him entirely and would likely still be looking for those six little screws to fix that fan. Which, by the way is working perfectly!! Not bad for amateurs.

As we are waiting for the bus after church one evening along comes our neighbor Ema, who also attends Cristo Redentor but who normally rides home with her husband. This night she was taking the bus back and showed us that there are actually two buses we can take from the stop downtown to get us home, not just one…doubling our choices for a quicker return home, plus we get to venture into another new neighborhood and see what’s going on there! Timing and education! Ten minutes later and we’d have been on our regular bus and would have missed out on Colinas Del Real.

I needed to get my haircut and had wanted to wait until we went to La Cruz again so that Judith could cut it for me and we could get in a little visit, but that wasn’t working out, so I ventured over to a little shop about two blocks from the house. Timing, don’t you know. So I met Johanna and her little daughter and when I introduced myself she allowed that she already knew quite a bit about us. We are North Americans, we live in the orange house on the corner by the park, we drive a dark blue pickup, we are Christians, we have two grandkids and we have lived here a little over a month. Wow!! I thought La Cruz had a communication system bar none, but I guess even here in the big city news gets around. I was really blown away. Later when I commented on the similarity of the drawer pulls on her cabinets to the ones on our closets she said, oh yeah, the same guy that made these made the closets in your house! Now, if I had stuck to my guns and waited to see Judith in La Cruz I would never had met Johanna and learned that we were well known in the community already! Timing and education all rolled into one.

When we dropped my cousins at the airport last week Tim stuffed his extra leftover pesos into my hand. I tried to get him to keep them for his next trip, gosh, he even could have traded them back in for dollars, but he wanted us to have them. A few days later we learned that we (and many other WMPL missionaries) would have a short allowance for May. Six days before we learned about the short allowances God had already provided for us via my cousin and his extra pesos. Timing.

There’s a small mercado near here that we’ve wanted to check out for a while and have never taken the time to do it. The other day we finally stopped in and think we may have finally found the butcher we’ve been seeking for a year!! The great guys at Bastidas had the best beef we’ve had since we’ve been here. And the price was certainly right!! Plus this little market has a great fish monger and two different fruit and veggie stands…one stop shopping and about a mile from home!!