First, some background. Like many writers, I’m an introvert. Which is to say, social situations give me the willies. Sometimes diarrhea. So when I was invited to participate in a Bible study with twenty other women, let’s just say I was ambivalent. My dear friend brought me the study guide. The kind of book I like: thick enough to jack the car. Her kindness made it very hard for me to say no.

I attended week one of the study and didn’t spontaneously combust. Go figure.

As I worked through the book (the part I like), one of the exercises prompted an action item. Mine, word-for-word: I will look for confirmation that God wants an intimate relationship with me. In the world, the Bible, other people, everywhere. In meditation and media.

I know, I know. Bad grammar. Fragments. I didn’t think I’d be sharing it.

Two days later, my husband and I were walking in the Metroparks. We almost didn’t go because it was a Friday, and I get lazy, especially after a glass of wine and pizza. He convinced me, was how it went, as Ilona convinced me to do the study. Thank God I have all these good influences in my life or else I’d be a solitary slug.

As I often do, being a middle-aged woman with a bladder the size of a kumquat, I stopped at the pit toilet near Wallace Lake. The seat was down. Odd, for pit toilets. Odder, on the lid was a plastic ziplock bag with some change and a $5 bill. I gasped. It was clearly left there on purpose. Forgetting my bladder, I rushed back into the sunlight to inspect the gift. Here’s a picture:

I couldn’t help but cry a little as we finished our walk. Somewhere out there is a person who wanted to (oh so creatively) bless a stranger. And here I am, a woman who asked God for a tangible sign of love. Note that I didn’t write pit toilets in my list of where I’d look. When I wrote the world, I meant nature.

I will never spend that $5. It holds my place in the study book that prompted me to look for God, the one I almost didn’t own because I almost didn’t go to the study. I have it because I found it on a walk I almost didn’t go on. Anyone could have found that money. Somebody else might’ve thought: Look at this idiot, throwing away five bucks. I hope it spends…

But I got it. And it’s worth is so much more than $5.