Personal Prayer’s Clear Lens

A guy went to the eye-doctor and said, “I keep getting a stabbing pain in my eye when I drink coffee.”  The doctor said, “Have you tried taking the spoon out of the cup?”

This summer I took a pair of glasses into a store to be repaired. I had an older pair which I wore in the meantime. The repair had to be sent to California so I was going to be (sigh) without my updated glasses for about a week.

I received a phone call to come into the store to pick up my glasses in a little under a week.  Yay!  When I arrived at the store and he handed me my glasses, I saw that they were not mine. Apparently California had sent to my store –the wrong glasses!

In the meantime, the spare pair that I was wearing also broke! (that’s two pairs in a row, and a separate message about something I was not “seeing clearly”).

My first pair of glasses finally did arrive and I figured I’d wear them for a little while before I gave the spare pair in to be fixed. That way I could be sure that the fixed pair were strong and feel confident that I would be able to wear them without any problems.

Fast forward about a month and my husband comes home from work one day, hands me my old pair of glasses and notifies me:  “I have your glasses from the store. He says you owe him a certain amount of money.”

That’s funny.  Really?  I must have left them in the store, while I tried on the new pair I picked up.  I was glad he found them.  “The owner must have gotten mixed up — those are only my spare.   The pair I gave in to be ‘fixed’ was over the summer.”

Well, my husband asked me to call the store owner to straighten it out with him, and let him know that I did not owe him any money.  “I paid him the $80.00 today”, said my husband, “but when you told me on the phone they weren’t yours, he gave me the money back.”  The store owner took my husband’s word, and gave him the glasses back on the condition that I would give him a call to let him know the story.

I was remiss, and let about a week pass while I still did not make the call to the store. It didn’t seem so urgent — after all “he” was the one who made the mistake.  Come to think of it, I also received a call from him about a month prior saying that he had my glasses! At that time, I laughed to myself thinking, “This is another repeat of when the wrong glasses came in from California and he thought they were mine!”  I meant to call him back but I didn’t get around to it then, either.

To reiterate, a week passed and I hadn’t called him back about the glasses my husband had brought home. So my husband reminded me about calling him. “I’m just concerned about the fact that the store owner let me take the glasses on my word, that my wife would call him back and let him know the story.”  He asked that I please call tomorrow.

Today, I called the store owner and told him that I had not gotten “those” glasses repaired. The ones I got repaired were over the summer. And I must have left these glasses in the store. He was fine with my explanation and we left it at that.

My amazement comes for the following reason:  Tonight I was doing an hour-long session of personal prayer, and going over the events of the day, when the following words came out:  “I called the store owner today and everything worked out fine and my husband was happy that I called.  I am grateful for all that.”  As I thought about it, my mind flashed over how I related the story to my husband that night. With Divine direction, I remembered my husband asking me what had happened and what the mix-up was all about. And as I played the movie over in my personal prayer session, all of a sudden it hit me — that I really “did” give in the second pair to be repaired!  Wow!  I was so grateful to remember, and never would have remembered it if I hadn’t sat down in personal prayer to think about “how grateful I was that all the pieces (seemingly!) worked out!”

(I know I wouldn’t have given it a second thought otherwise).

This time G-d helped me make good on my accounts!  And that’s my story. Tomorrow or the next day, I will go into the store with my head slightly lowered, and ask the store owner to forgive me.  Then, I’ll pay him.