My husband and I stopped at a store for placemats. He’d bought some earlier that day, and when the big, farm style rooster design delighted me, we went back for more.
I paid in cash at the register. Moving fast, the cashier handed me coins, but accidentally shut the drawer before giving back the bill part of my change. The manager was filling Mylar balloons for another customer and couldn’t assist right away with reopening the drawer. So the cashier wisely asked the next person in line if she would pay in cash, too. Yes, I can, the woman replied. But when presented with a $100 bill, the cashier deflatedly responded, I can’t change that. And we were back to waiting for the manager to finish filling balloons.
There was no sense in getting angry or shaming the young clerk for having made a mistake. My husband left to get the car, and I waited for the manager to be free. After a time, I had my money and was on my way.
I pushed open the glass door to the vestibule and found a young mom struggling to exit the second set of doors. I didn’t think this through, she said wryly, as she tried to pull the cart towards her, backing out to the sidewalk. I laughed, reaching forward to hold the door. Yet I was far more interested in her newborn. His eyes were closed, and his little face was stretching in all directions as he lay in his carrier, perched on the cart’s child seat. So sweet to see someone so tiny, so new.
A woman entered to my left. She smiled warmly at the baby. Then, the scene suddenly shifted. When the mom pulled her cart a few more inches, the baby carrier tipped over to the left. In a split second, I noticed that the baby was not strapped into the carrier, nor was the carrier secured to the shopping cart. In the time it took to gasp, I watched an inevitable catastrophe play out.
Except that it didn’t. As if gently pushed up into place, the carrier tipped back into balance and landed the baby safely aright. Not by any reasonable laws of physics could this have happened. The incoming shopper held her chest, breathless, exclaiming My heart just stopped! The mom said disparagingly, I’m a new mother…can you tell? and I exhaled, adding with encouragement, You’re doing fine—despite the current averted disaster.
Back at the car, I said to my husband, Did you see that? THAT was divine intervention. There’s no way that baby wasn’t going overboard.
What precise timing. Tiny moments led up to my presence at the door—the placemats that sent us back to the store, the delayed manager, the customer with a $100 bill. All had been synchronized, the visible with the invisible, and I’d been allowed to participate in an astonishing moment of divine grace.