One Great Benefit of Small Town Living

Something quite amazing just happened this morning. First, I have to give you a little backstory. Our church is selling fruit to raise money to send the youth on choir/mission tour next summer. This is the first year the twins will be participating in the tour so we have been busy selling fruit to anyone and everyone we can. Last Friday, my daughter sold fruit to a fellow UMW member and she said she would leave the check on her porch and we could come pick it up. She was fixing to leave on vacation so we needed to get it that day. Not a problem. We were already going to be in town that morning for a program at the twins former private school and we had to go right by her house anyway. So, after the program, we stopped and picked up the check and put it on the console of my truck. Then we went and ran a few errands and picked up lunch at Subway. When we got home, my daughter went to find the check to put it with the order form and she couldn't find it. We took my truck apart, searched her room and the yard, my purse, everything we could think of. The only other place it could be was the parking lot at Subway. I remembered that my girl couldn't get her door open because she had too many drinks in her hand and I walked around the truck and opened it for her, leaving the driver door open at the same time. It was pretty windy, thanks to Hurricane Sandy. It had to have blown out then and we didn't notice it. My mom was going into town so she said she would take her back to Subway and see if,  by a miracle, it was still there. (FYI-town is a 20 minute drive from our house) Of course, there was no check. They checked the stores around Subway to see if anyone turned in an envelope with a check inside but no one had. My daughter was pretty upset about it. She tried calling the lady who gave us the check but she had already left for vacation and wouldn't be back for a week. The turn in date for the fruit orders was Oct. 28th so we decided to go ahead and pay for her fruit ourselves and hope no one cashed that check before she could stop payment on it.

This morning, I received a call from a friend that goes to our church. She works at a bank in town and said that one of their branches called her and told her that they found a check in their parking lot made out to our church (they knew she went to that church, too) and our daughter's name in the memo. She asked if we had dropped it in the bank parking lot. I told her we had lost it in the parking lot across the street from that bank. When I say 'across the street' I mean across a 4 lane highway (the main one through town). Subway is in a strip mall at the far back corner of the parking lot. This check travelled about an 8th of a mile, across a busy highway to end up in the parking lot of that bank. The same bank that the check was drawn on!!!

I have no explanation as to how this check ended up where it could be reunited with us. It shouldn't have been. But it did. Had we lived in a big city, we never would have gotten the check back. Everyone here knows everyone else. I am so grateful for the people in this town :)