{"id":28337,"date":"2019-04-13T17:50:54","date_gmt":"2019-04-13T22:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=28337"},"modified":"2019-04-13T17:56:24","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T22:56:24","slug":"when-strangers-tell-us-things-we-want-to-hear-we-want-to-believe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=28337","title":{"rendered":"When strangers tell us things we want to hear, we want to believe"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“You have an angel thinking about you,”<\/em> she said as she extended her hand with the penny.<\/p>\n

I smiled and gave a friendly little laugh as I said, “Thank you.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“I’m serious,”<\/em> 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.”<\/em><\/p>\n

And with that, she went back to her phone conversation and went to the counter to order.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“God is sending you a miracle,”<\/em> 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.”<\/em><\/p>\n

It sounds crazy. It’s just silly superstition. I know that.<\/p>\n

But I want to believe.<\/p>\n

I’ll keep the penny — just in case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Keep Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[577,578,576],"class_list":{"0":"post-28337","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-angels","8":"tag-penny","9":"tag-superstition","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1x9iR-7n3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28337"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28346,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28337\/revisions\/28346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}