Thursday, June 4, 2009

The coincidence of two's

Last week I found a t-shirt of mine that I haven't seen in a long time that I got while I was a tour director in Alaska. It's from a tiny town called Chicken that has a population of 3 families and a horse. The next day I saw someone at the grocery store with the exact same shirt I briefly chatted with him about how he knew about it and then not 1 hr later I saw someone at the dog park with a Chicken Alaska shirt on. I've been trying to figure out if it's a sign and if so what of.

In the meantime, yesterday I was dropping my friend Elijah off at downtown and just as he got out of the car I heard a pop. Then as I pulled into traffic I could smell burning rubber. I was looking around and saw a stalled car not far up the road. By the time I pulled the 5 car lengths up there were massive flames coming out from under the car. I had my window down so I said to the guy in the passenger seat, "Dude your car is on fire." He looked at me quizzically so I repeated louder with pointing, "Your car is on fire." I took this brief moment to think about the fact that I was sitting next to a highly combustible object while in my own highly combustible object. There wasn't anything else that I could do so I yelled, "Your car is on fire!" and punched it. The car behind me yelled at them to get out of the car & by the time I hit the end of the block they were out and people were pulling over. My friend Drew suggested that I should have gotten out to see if any of them needed pastoral care but I retorted that they didn't need a pastor they needed a fire extinguisher.

This is where it gets crazy. A few hours later I'm sitting at small group, which was at my house, and Mary says, "I think there's a fire across the street. No, maybe it's just their BBQ." A few other people check it out, I look out the front door and sure enough our across the street neighbor, Rick's BBQ is fully on fire. So I bolt out the door & across the street yelling "Hey! Hey! Hey!" I didn't know his name at the time or I would have yelled that. He came out & put the fire out, we chatted for a couple of minutes and he assured me that he had another BBQ in back.
I have no doubt that these are merely coincidences but these seem highly improbable coincidences and therefore worthy to note. My roommate Nacole suggested that maybe I'm supposed to go to Chicken Alaska and start a fire, you know to help global warming. I'm not going to do that.

3 comments:

Laura said...

i love your stories and am so glad you are blogging again. yay!

87d said...

Maybe you're supposed to go to Chicken, Alaska and PREVENT a fire! You know, catch it early and become a hero. ...to those three families.

Megan said...

I like the idea of preventing a fire, or at least warning people, rather than the slash and burn idead that Nacole had. Thanks Heather.