Flooded

No pictures of my flooded tent this morning.

Nor of my phone plopped in a puddle at the side of my tent.

No picture of the kind woman at the visitor center who helped me locate a phone store.

Nor of the phone store and the kind man who greeted me.

I tell him what happened – waking to a down pour, the flooded tent.

No picture of the only other person in the store. An old man with a sharp jaw and tangle of white hair puzzling over the table of phones.

He looks over at me, “In Vietnam that happened all the time.”

“He’s one of our best customers,” the young man at the phone store tells me after the old man has left.

“His daughter told me he was the only one in his unit to come home from the war.”

My flooded phone, no, not such a big deal. It never really was.

The young man goes on, “We were robbed at gunpoint last night. No, I wasn’t here but my employees were and I gave them the day off to recover…”

Which all leads me here to sitting in this coffee shop writing this blog while another kind young man at a repair shop takes a look to see what he can do.

But now matter what he sees, I already know.

This pelting rain. These flooded intersections.

This flood of gratitude for such meetings of grace.

A picture worth remembering.