Silver Lining Part II

I think these posts are my equivalent of those classified ads in honour of various saints. Do people still do those? I don't read the classifieds anymore, but I used to love those tidbits. "In honour of St. Jude. Found Wedding Ring." Those saint messages are often the greatest short stories. Somewhere recently (if it was your blog, I'm sorry for not remembering) I was reminded of Hemingway's great piece of flash fiction:

For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.

Saint classifieds are kind of like that.

When you feel like God has done something good for you--no matter how trivial it seems to the outside world--you want to tell people about it. Since I have a blog, this is where I tell people. Especially the people who've patiently waded through the bad bits.

So here's today's silver lining. It begins with my wanting a salad. A specific salad that is only sold at Panera. Not a bit of lettuce with croutons and ranch dressing, but a sublime mix of specially-marinated, grilled chicken, dried apples, gorgonzola, roma tomatoes...ahhhh. I'm hungry just thinking about it. My love, the Fuji Apple Chicken Salad. Lucky for me the Panera is a bit over a mile away and easy to get to. So Tim and I jaunted over, only to see a little sign on the door that says they were closing early. I missed my beloved dinner by 17 minutes.

Never fear! There's a new Panera open in Mt. Juliet. Granted, that's a 15 minute drive from the Hermitage Panera, but it was a nice evening and we both work out of the house so a bit of a scenery change was not necessarily a bad thing. Funnily enough, the Mt. Juliet Panera was also closed. I knew it was bad news when the manager met us outside. He was handing out bags of free bread and apologising to the 5 carloads of people in quest for a late supper. I was one of those people. I was also the one who politely but frustratedly said they should coordinate with the Hermitage store to not be closed on the same night, as we had driven all the way from Hermitage. He was surprised at both the fact the other store was closed and that some person was crazy enough to want Panera food that badly. So he gave us a bunch of coupons.

No, I didn't get my salad. But the silver lining--the little gift from God (and the manager of the Mt. Juliet Panera)--was two free loaves of bread, three coupons for free loaves of bread, three coupons for free Panera pizzas and three coupons for $2.00 off any salad.

Now sure, this is no big deal but in my world where I just praised God for miracles, getting free loaves of bread (and a total of five loaves at that!) seems like a bit of a shout-out from the Lord.

If someone gives me two free fish tomorrow, I'm gonna have a heart attack! ;-p