Little Miracles

While I was on the trip which my older daughter's 8th grade class took to DC, there was an incident that led to one of those little miracles of life.  There was a girl on the trip who had recently had surgery and had to be confined to a wheelchair for the duration of this adventure.  On Sunday, a wheel on the wheelchair had some sort of malfunction and that particular wheelchair could no longer be used.  The trip leader and several others were tearing their hair out trying to find a replacement but to no avail.  Rental shops were not open on the holiday weekend and so forth.   I was in the front of the bus so I was privy to the whole drama.  Suddenly I thought of our wheelchair at church and then managed to locate and call the nearest Episcopal Church to where we were. Not expecting to get an answer to a phone call on the Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend, I was hoping to at least get an emergency phone number for the rector.  I was not especially looking forward to this call as Sunday afternoons are not good times to call clergy for things that on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of emergency rating falls at a -5, but I was willing to do it.  The first time I called, there was no answer but the recording did have an emergency number for the priest.  Good sign, I thought.  However, I had to call back after obtaining pen and paper.  The second time I called, much to my surprise, a woman answered, Sister Lydia.  Sister Lydia "just happened" to be in the office picking something up.  She could not have been more helpful.  The long and short of it is that they did have a wheelchair at the church and she was not only willing to wait for our school trip leader to pick it up, she negotiated a drop off time on Monday, which was Memorial Day.  Blessings to Sister Lydia of St. Paul's K Street in our nation's capital!