While driving back to my office in Neenah, Wisconsin from a meeting in nearby Menasha, I took a different route than normal and saw a couple of missionaries from the local Hmong speaking branch walking along a Neenah road. It looked like it was about to rain and I felt that I should offer them a ride. I turned around, pulled up next to them and offered a ride. They only had about 30 yards to go for their appointment, but I told them that since the appointment had a good chance of falling through (a particular problem in Hmong culture, and a common problem for missionary work in general), I would gladly give them a ride to their next location if the person wasn’t home – they didn’t have umbrellas and really would need a ride if the rain started.

As I expected, the man they were visiting, actually a member, wasn’t home. The rain had just begun, so they were happy to get a ride. Turns out they wanted to take a bus back to Appleton, so I just took them to Appleton (12 minutes away) instead of taking them to a bus station. After I dropped them off, I realized I was close to home and wondered if I should just drive by to see if all was well. No, that would be a waste of time – best to just get straight back to work. But since it seemed odd that I would end up close to home, I silently asked if there might be some reason to drop by and check on things. Contrary to my plans, I felt like I should, and so drove by my house – just a slight detour.

When I saw my house, everything looked OK and I was planning to just drive by and head back to work, but since nobody had answered the phone when I called a few minutes earlier, I was surprised to see my wife’s car in the driveway. Curious, I pulled into the driveway and went into the garage and was about to enter the door to the kitchen when I noticed a pile of mail on the step to the door. As I was looking at the mail, my wife came running over to me from across the street. She had just gone over to a neighbor to stay for a while since she was locked out of the house. An unusual series of events had resulted in our daughter-in-law locking the house up and going elsewhere while my wife was away without a housekey. My wife had returned five minutes before I showed up to find herself locked out, and was wondering what to do. Sweet timing! So the missionaries indirectly helped me be a hero. I was quite grateful to have been able to end up in the right place at the right time – with a housekey.

Just one of the many ways the Lord blesses us when we do little acts of service.