Help is Always There

I have always been amazed at how people have magically shown up to help me when I have found myself stranded or otherwise lost in a foreign country. Once in Hungary, my sister and I got off at the wrong stop at four in the morning. We were trying to go to Budapest and ended up two stops beyond it, in the middle of no where. I do mean the middle of nowhere. There wasn't even a platform. We just followed the train tracks through a field, to the "station", that seemed to have housed livestock at some point in the recent past. We discovered quickly that we would have to wait until 8:00 a.m. for the banks to open in order to exchange currency and buy a ticket back to Budapest. I closed my eyes and said "God, whatever, where ever, who ever you are....we need help." When I opened my eyes there was a bearded man with a backpack asking me if I needed help. Could this be real? I explained the situation and thought maybe he could at least translate for us. He walked away and when he returned, produced two tickets back to Budapest! This kind of thing happened so often that I felt a bit guilty that I was always on the receiving end. All I had to do was ask in earnest and somehow, somebody heard me. Someone was listening...
Recently though, I had stayed at work quite late and decided to take an alternate route home. This was such an alternate route that I had begun vibbing it. I was going down streets I'd never seen before just to see if they connected. At a stop light I happened to look over to see sone of the foreign students from my class. I almost didn't recognize them. I waved and they waved back with both arms yelling "HELP", feigning desperation. I turned around and found that they had misread the bus schedule and now it was too late to get back to the west side without being on the bus for a couple of hours. It was great to finally be on the other side of the equation. Finally I was in a position to even the scales a bit.
When I saw them the next day, we all marveled at the absolute serendipity of me being there at that particular time. It was as if they had asked me to come. Thankfully, I heard them.