Fortune Teller

Decisions. You either love them or hate them. Like you love to decide which clock would look best in your living room, or what special present to get your husband for his birthday. But the decisions that affect the rest of your life are usually harder to decipher. To bad there’s not a magic 8 ball you can shake to decide for you . . . but there are fortune cookies. Yes that’s right. I believe in the magic of the fortune cookie – well at least for this story anyway.

Allan returned home from Georgia empty handed. The job he interviewed for didn’t work out. Even though he sent dozens of resumes out and made contacts all over he still didn’t have a job there. But you know when you want something so badly that you really believe that it will work out? That was us. We wanted to live in Georgia and we believed that we would. So we put our house up for sale and went through the emotions of possibly saying goodbye to friends and family.

But there was something gnawing at me. We still hadn’t found a stable job in Georgia and we were just going to pack up and leave? What if our house didn’t sell? Or where would we live if we hadn’t found a job by then? So many doubts and questions continued to flood my mind. Then there was the question of what Allan was going to do with his career. Would he go back to school?

This brings me back to decisions! Ugh why couldn’t I just get an answer? We felt good about going didn’t we? We did everything we could by putting up our house for sale and getting ready to leave the state. I didn’t even enroll Jackson for preschool because we thought we would be gone by then.

So one morning I said the words “we need to talk” to my husband. I think he flinches every time I say that. Don’t you? You know something is wrong the minute you hear that phrase. Yet just like the scary movie where the girl walks down the hall toward the bedroom where you know (and she does to) the murderer is going to be, you are too deliciously scared and to curious not to see what happens next. I’m pretty sure this is how Allan feels every time I say the dreaded words.

I brought up school. How were we going to afford to send him back as an out of state student? And what did he want to do with his life? Those were two very loaded questions. We chatted back and forth and then Allan called our good friend Ben who has been our neighbor since we moved in. He came over and gave Allan some counsel, prayed with him, and talked with him.

When it was all said and done Allan told me that Georgia was still the right answer but just not at this time. I’m not going to lye it hurt for both of us. How could something feel right and then suddenly not? Allan felt strongly that he needed to go back to school and get more education. I felt a huge relief which confirmed the veracity of it all. But the question still lingered; did we make the right choice?

That night we were so emotionally and physically exhausted by the days events that we decided to get take out from a Mongolian place down the street from us. My husband ordered our comfort food of rice and sesame seed chicken. After the meal we picked up our fortune cookies and Allan opened his first. I don’t remember what it said but I’m sure it was something generic because he tossed it aside afterward.

Then I opened my fortune cookie without any sort of thought. It read “Life is a series of choices. Today all of yours were good.” I read it out loud and looked at Allan and we both burst into tears. I found it to be a small tender mercy from the Lord in which he was letting me know that He cared for us and He was watching out for us. Now I don’t recommend you order take out every time a big decision comes your way. The Lord answers our prayers in so many different ways that you can never count on it twice. But He does answer our prayers in His time and in His own way.  I will never forget that single fortune cookie which gave me so much comfort on such a difficult day.