When strangers tell us things we want to hear, we want to believe

By David McElroy · April 13, 2019

I’m having a late lunch at a McDonald’s near my house. There aren’t many people in here at this time of the afternoon. I noticed a woman come in and head to the restroom near me. She was talking on her iPhone, so I didn’t pay much attention to her.

As she left the restroom and walked near my table, she asked the person on the phone to hold on. She walked right up to my table and I started wondering whether I knew her and she was coming to talk to me. But she stooped right next to my table — about 18 inches from my feet — and picked up a penny from the floor.

“You have an angel thinking about you,” she said as she extended her hand with the penny.

I smiled and gave a friendly little laugh as I said, “Thank you.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “I felt it as I walked past you and this is confirmation. You need an angel today and she’s thinking about you.”

And with that, she went back to her phone conversation and went to the counter to order.

As far as I know, I’ve never met the woman. She was Hispanic, well-dressed, well-spoken and seemed to be about 45 years old.

I wondered whether there was some superstition about pennies and angels, so I did a quick search and discovered several instances of people writing about such things.

“They say when an angel misses you, they toss a penny down from heaven,” one writer said. “Sadly, not everyone knows how much truth there is in this old adage.”

Another said it’s a sign from an angel that a loved one is thinking about you. Some of the writers were religious. Some claimed it was a psychic or spiritual idea from some other perspective. There seem to be several variations of the superstition.

It sounds just as silly as any other superstition. I don’t toss horseshoes over my shoulder. I step on cracks and walk under ladders. They all seem like silliness or metaphors to me.

But here’s the thing. When this woman told me that, I wanted to believe her. So the interesting thing here isn’t the penny or the woman or any angel or a loved one. The interesting thing is that my heart wanted to believe.

I have a feeling this is how a lot of superstitions spread. People made dubious associations between events — a crow passing overhead, followed by someone’s death, maybe — and then jumped to conclusions about what signs meant. Then they repeated their conclusions — and others believed the things which they wanted to believe or maybe the things which scared them. And the superstitions spread.

Today hasn’t been a good day for me. There’s nothing specific that happened, but I’ve been dealing with acceptance of something I haven’t wanted to accept. It has me down.

So when this woman told me an angel is thinking about me today, I wanted to believe that. I wanted to believe someone has me on her mind. (I think of angels as female, for some reason.) I have no rational reason to want to feel this way, but it’s somehow comforting. Just like Fox Mulder in a different context, I want to believe.

As I was finishing this, the woman who found the penny and started this came back to my table. She’s apparently been eating and she’s leaving now.

“God is sending you a miracle,” she said. “You need to save that penny. When your angel tells you why you’re on her mind, that penny will remind you of what happened. Trust me.”

It sounds crazy. It’s just silly superstition. I know that.

But I want to believe.

I’ll keep the penny — just in case.

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I just went from joy to bitter disappointment in the space of seconds. I had an exciting idea, but it was something I needed feedback and discussion about. I wanted to turn to a trusted partner and say, “What do you think about this?” But I felt deflated because there was no one there. I recently shared with you how much I miss having someone to take care of, but I also strongly miss having a partner who’s there to listen and to help me plot how we can move forward in life together. The best marriages are sort of a “mutual aid society,” an arrangement by which each person is fully committed to helping the other become the best he or she can be. It was actually so late tonight when I had this thought that a partner might very well have been asleep already. But it would have been enough to say to myself, “We can talk about that tomorrow” — if I knew someone cared and wanted to be part of that conversation with me. I miss that kind of relationship. Doesn’t everyone need this?

Here’s more evidence that the modern U.S. school system is badly broken. It was once a reasonable assumption that a high school graduate who was accepted to a major college could read and write competently. For years, colleges have known their incoming freshmen’s writing was mostly dreadful, so they’ve been forced to teach students to write. (They’ve done it very poorly.) Now it has become obvious that basic reading skills among freshmen are so terrible that some colleges must now teach kids how to read. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, all incoming freshmen will now take a mandatory three-course sequence which will teach them how to read and understand what they’re reading, in addition to trying to teach them how to write. If a student has made it this far in life without learning how to read and write, this probably won’t work, but the system will eventually be dumbed down to ignore the failure. Parents who trust the modern school system to educate their children are gambling with their kids’ lives. The system is broken.

Catholic priest Richard Rohr is a well-known writer and teacher on several subjects, one of which is the Enneagram. Most of his work with which I’ve been familiar is related to spiritual and psychological development. I recently discovered that someone has posted a good bit of one of his Enneagram workshops on YouTube and I’d like to recommend that if you have any interest in the Enneagram personality typing system. It was only about six months ago that I discovered I’m actually a Type 1 (instead of a Type 4), so I’ve been watching various teachers talk about that type lately. Rohr happens to be a Type 1 as well, and his description of the type — and especially his self-criticism — struck home with me. Here are links to his teaching about most of the types: Type 1, Type 2, Type 3, Type 4, Type 5, Type 6, Type 9. (Types 7 and 8 are missing.) You might also enjoy an interview that Krista Tippett did with Rohr for the On Being podcast two years ago. It was listening to that interview again this week which prompted me to go find his Enneagram teaching. I don’t always agree with Rohr about everything, but he’s always thought-provoking.

It’s still not a common pattern, but more families are deciding today that it makes sense for a dad to stay home with the kids while a mom is gone to a job. The specifics of such arrangements vary. In some cases, the wife works outside the home all the time and the husband runs the household. In others, the man works from home and the woman works outside the home part of the time. In such an arrangement, the parents switch who’s supervising children depending on who’s home and who’s busy. Society still seems to collectively have a problem with non-traditional parenting arrangements, but they can make a lot of sense for many people. Of course, the far-more-common pattern is a father who works full-time elsewhere and a mother who works full-time as well, but who still has to take care of kids and home when she’s finished with her paying job. Different arrangements are going to work for different families, but it’s clear that the worst of all worlds in the expectation that the woman work a full-time job and then come home and work another full-time job raising children on her own.

Stories about young people running away from home often don’t end well, but I just heard a story of a good outcome. The young woman who shared her story with me isn’t a child, though. She’s in her early 20s, but she ran away from home last year. She lived in Michigan with her dysfunctional family. Her mom was addicted to meth and various prescription drugs. She was the only one in the family who worked — and her family took almost all of the money she earned. The only bright spot in her life was a guy she met online playing a video game. The two grew close and fell in love. About 18 months ago, she secretly packed everything she owned — and he drove from Birmingham to Michigan to pick her up without her family’s knowledge. Today, they’re married and have a new baby. She says leaving her family was the second best thing that ever happened to her — and her husband and baby are the best. “He doesn’t seem to understand what a big deal it was,” she said, “but he saved my life. I took a big risk and he did, too, but I’m happy and loved for the first time in my life.” It might not be common, but some runaway stories do end well.

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