Sue

My friend John and I go back many years, and we get on very well – except that he’s always given me a hard time about being a Christian. We had a heated discussion about my faith a few weeks ago and I came away feeling totally defeated. John is much more intellectual than I am; I find it hard to stand up to his arguments.

I said things like, ‘But if Jesus was God…’ Afterwards I thought ‘It’s not IF! Why can’t I be stronger about what I believe?’ I felt so bad about it, that I was comparing myself to Peter denying he knew Jesus (Luke 22:54-62).

I steered clear of the topic when we were together after that. The other day we were doing some shopping in a supermarket on a Saturday. The shop was busy and crowded so we tried to get the shopping over and done with as soon as possible, but when we got to the checkout John realised he couldn’t find his wallet.

John is far too cool to panic, but he was looking a little flustered when he went out to the car to search for his wallet. I stayed in the shop to look there.

God is always answering my prayers for lost things.

‘You know where it is,’ I said to him. ‘Therefore the location of this wallet is not a complete mystery. It’s known. Please show me where it is or help me find it.’

The moment I stopped praying I knew that I needed to go to the checkout and ask a particular man who was serving at one of the tills. Don’t ask me how I knew that; when I’d finished praying, the information was there in my head. He was one of five staff on the tills and they all had long queues. I apologised my way to the front of his queue and said, ‘Has a wallet been handed in to you?’

The man looked thoroughly disinterested. Without even bothering to look at me, he took a piece of paper out of the till and shoved it at me, then waited for me to go away.

The paper had a name and phone number on it. John had rejoined me, so we phoned the woman who had left her number.

‘Yes, I’ve got your wallet!’ she told us. ‘I was going to leave it with a man at the till, but he looked completely disinterested, and with the wallet being full of cash and credit cards, I thought I should look after it myself.’

She said she was only five minutes away and she came straight back to us with the wallet.

‘How did you know?’ John asked me afterwards. ‘With all those people on the tills, and only one of them had the phone number, how did you know who to ask?’

There was no way I was going to repeat our argument of a few weeks ago. I just looked at him and said, ‘You know me. I have my contacts.’

I hope he knew what I meant.