The Right Place, The Right Time
Yesterday I told you about the wealthy Kirbys who do what brings wealth and prestige and the eccentric Vanderhofs who do what makes them happy while trusting the One Who takes care of the lilies of the field.
After Alice Sycamore (granddaughter of Grandpa Vanderhof) falls in love with Tony Kirby, she is pretty worried about what the Kirby family is going to think about her rather interesting family. Deciding to face the problem head on, she invites the Kirbys to come to her family’s home. To her horror, they show up, not on the night when she has planned a nice dinner, but on a night when the entire household is doing what they usually do — with their usual enthusiasm.
The hilarious situation goes from bad to worse when the Kirbys and the Vanderhofs all end up in the drunk tank at a local jail after fireworks start going off in the basement. Mr. Kirby is appalled while Grandpa Vanderhof makes the best of the situation. As they sit side by side behind bars, Grandpa turns to Mr. Kirby and says, “After all, you did come on the wrong night!”
I’ve had wrong night experiences myself a few times. When I was a teenager, I answered a knock at our front door only to find a guy friend from school who had come to my house for a party. Problem was, he came on the wrong night. Poor guy.
When Bethany was a girl, I planned a special evening for just the two of us to go to the theater. Boy, were we surprised when someone else came to sit in our seats. We had come on the wrong night! The kind staff gave us other seats and let us stay.
The day that Ray and I drove to Chattanooga to help set up our booth for the curriculum fair, we looked very out of place with everyone else dressed for unloading boxes and moving things around. Ray and I were on a tight schedule and were dressed and ready for a concert at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, where we expected to go after we finished setting up.
Problem was, the concert wasn’t that Thursday night, the 16th; it was the next Thursday night, the 23rd. We were thankful to have figured that out before driving two and a half hours to Nashville!
When July 23rd came, we did drive to Nashville, arriving at the Opry House at 7:10 for the 7:30 show. The concert we were there to see was the finale of the Fine Arts Summer Academy (FASA) which we saw and which I told you about last summer. We knew two young ladies in the show, were very excited, and didn’t want to miss a minute.
The young ladies’ parents had realized several days before that they had two extra tickets which they kindly offered to us. I had a text that our tickets were waiting for us in an envelope in the ticket office. We were a bit dismayed when we walked in and found a long line. Finally, it was our turn. We told our saleslady that two tickets were waiting in an envelope for Notgrass. Instead of looking behind her at the envelopes lying on the counter, she typed some things into her computer and printed us out two tickets.
These we hurriedly took to the front door and handed them to the ticket taker. The time was now about 7:20. When the ticket taker scanned our tickets, a big red box came up on her scanner. She took them to another ticket taker who told her that we should take them back to the ticket office. This we did and there we found a line about the same length as the one before. The time was now 7:24.
As Ray waited in line, I went searching for help. I saw a woman with an Opry name tag on and told her our situation. She took our two tickets into a back office and came out with two different tickets. She said that the first two tickets were for last year’s show! We hurried back to our ticket taker at the front door with our new tickets. Boy, were we relieved when a green box showed up on her scanner. We even made it to our seats before the concert began.
Ray later looked at the receipt we had received when we went through the ticket office line the first time. It showed the last four digits of a credit card we no longer have, but that we had had last summer when we bought tickets for the 2014 FASA show! Somewhere in the memory of that computer was information about tickets we had bought for July 24, 2014, along with our credit card number; and it spit out that information on July 23, 2015.
On July 16, we had realized that we almost showed up for a concert on the wrong night. Little did we know that a week later (according to our tickets), we would show up for that same concert a year late!
What Mr. Kirby didn’t realize was that he was actually at just the right place at the right time when he was in the drunk tank, because of what he learned there.
My times are in Your hand.
Psalm 31:15