Not a mopey blog!! :D Um, but it is going to be an incredibly long one. I have TONS of stories to tell from today� I will try very hard to make it as short as possible.

Today has been the greatest and weirdest day ever. I cannot find a font that fits because they are all either nice OR weird, but not both, and that is the only font that would fit today.

What�s funny is all of it has been making me think about God and his sovereignty and his activity in my life more.

Okay, first weird thing: today was FULL of walk-in customers. That never happens. In all the time I�ve been there, we�ve only ever had one or two walk-ins a day. Today we had, like, 6! That�ll come in later.

Okay, second weird thing: halfway through my day, a Hispanic-looking guy comes to the back door of the store, which is bizarre to begin with. Nobody but the Deliver Ease (our delivery service for addresses not within our range) guy and the one who brings them all their flowers comes to the back door. Georgene had two walk-in customers and a phone line on hold (that I had to put on hold!! Nothing like learning on the job, LOL), so I tended to the guy at our back door. Assuming nothing, I asked, �Hi, are you from Ease?�

To my surprise, he said, �No�I�m from next door,� he said, gesturing.

Confused, I said, �Oh� Can I help you?�

He mumbled something indistinguishable, but at the end I thought I caught, �Your place is on fire.�

The way he said it was even stranger than the words themselves. It was more like, �Your place is on FIRE!� Only not like he was alarmed. Like he was excited. Um�WEIRD!!!

For this reason, I was not at all sure I had heard correctly. �Our place is on�fire?� I questioned, trying to comprehend. Thoughts trickled through my head: Is it on the roof? The side of the building? Wouldn�t we have noticed? Maybe it�s the garage?

�Yeah, yeah, it�s still smoking,� he said, and pointed toward the back, in the same direction he had pointed to where his house was. I looked, expecting to see the building on fire or something. But what I saw was a blackened patch of dry bark dust on the edge of our back yard area, about three and a half feet by two, and indeed there was smoke twirling up slowly from the ground in various places. Almost like it was coming from under the ground.

�Oh, yeah, I�ll�check that out,� I said, not sure what else to say. The guy walked away and I turned back toward Georgene, who was still helping with customers. Okay! Guess it�s up to me! I thought. I knew what to do�we have lots of black buckets that normally hold flowers that sit out to the side of our building, next to the hose we use to fill them and clean them out. I grabbed a few buckets that still had water in them and started lugging buckets back and forth between the smoking patch of ground and the shop. It was thankfully about 25 feet from the shop, but in between the shop and the smoking ground was a stretch of dry grass and weeds.

I dumped the first bucket on fast and scared myself half to death when the water rushed down the side of the small hill toward the grass, carrying the smoking dirt along with it, and I saw a few flames suddenly flare up at the end of the water-dirt trail. But thankfully they were immediately gone. I lugged about 3 buckets in between the smoking area and the shop before I thought to stop in and see if Georgene was done with customers yet. She was, so I told her that the land was on fire out there. �Get the hose,� she said.

�Will it stretch?� I asked, doubtful.

�Yeah, it�ll stretch,� she said confidently. Still doubtful, I turned on the water and rolled out the hose as far as it would go, but it only reached about halfway across the grass. So instead I brought buckets to the end of the hose so I could quickly fill them up and carry them. As I carried one bucket to the smoke, I let the hose fill up another, and that was my system until Georgene came out to help a few minutes later. Together we doused the whole area until no more smoke trailed up from the ground. Georgene used the hose to dampen the grassy yard area, which was wise. But overall, it was just the weirdest thing! I told her about the weird guy. I kind of wonder if he may have started it�simply because of the way he acted�but we decided that it may have just been someone had thrown out a cigarette onto the ground. I�m definitely still suspicious of that guy, though, and I�m going to be keeping my eye on the grass outside to make sure it doesn�t mysteriously catch on fire again. BIZARRE! And if I hadn�t been there�I am sure God in his providence put me there today at that time.

The other very weird thing that happened today (and then I�ll get to the great stuff) involved a recipient of flowers I delivered to today. She was working at WinCo when I delivered them to her. I�ve delivered to people working before, usually at the mall, and they are generally delighted to receive flowers�usually from a boyfriend or something. (I even delivered flowers to a guy from a boyfriend once, LOL�Yeah�That was, ah, something else...) So when I walked up with the flowers to her checkout stand today, I expected her face to light up. Instead, she looked completely unaffected and almost unhappy. Now that is a truly odd reaction to getting flowers. I assumed that she was just really busy and really tired, probably near the end of her shift, and ready to get home, and thinking she�d deal with the flowers later.

So that was odd, but it got stranger. When I got home, after a few minutes of conversation with Stephen, I learned that he had gone to WinCo today, not that long after I had been there! How funny! I told him I delivered flowers to a girl who didn�t seem too happy about it. And he said, �Her name wasn�t Amber, was it?�

I gave him a Look. �Yeah. It was.� Um? �Was that who checked out your groceries?� It was.

Now that would�ve been enough bizarreness right there. But it gets better. Stephen had insight into why she had not been very happy to get them. Her dad (he assumed that�s who it was) was there at the time he was checking out, and they had been talking a bit, about her schooling and about some other things. Stephen heard something about �the emergency room or the morgue� and asked if she was going to medical school. �No,� she said. �That�s an analogy my marriage counselor gave me�I need to figure out if my marriage is in the emergency room or the morgue.�

Oh how sad!!! We were both very dismayed by this news from this poor WinCo checkout girl, and that it was very strange that we had both encountered her today. And we got it into our heads that maybe God was trying to tell us something. So, um, we decided to go back to WinCo. And buy something and talk to her as God led us.

We are not usually this adventurous, FYI. ESPECIALLY me!!

But that�s what we did. We drove up to WinCo and bought me some yogurt. We had our numbers written on a piece of paper should God lead us to give them to her. And we went to the checkout stand where she should have been�but someone else was there instead.

After talking about this quandary, Stephen said, �I saw a big bunch of flowers over there by Customer Service.� We agreed to check there afterward, if she didn�t walk across our path before then. But unfortunately, that�s just what she did. Just as we were finally getting up to the register, right by us she walked, flowers in hand, and out the door.

So all of that�For nothing? We talked it over on the way home. Both of us know that if
it were in God�s plan for us to talk to her, he would have made it happen. But we wonder why he led us to do it in the first place, just to lead us away. We think maybe he was testing our faith. Or maybe in another time we will meet her again. Now we both know what she looks like. We�ll see. :/

Okay, so that�s the weirdness from today. Now the greatness. Georgene likes to talk and I like to listen, and almost every Saturday there�ll be a stretch of time where I am listening to part of her life story. She�s been through a lot, and is going through a lot, and I have felt more and more over the past few weeks that God has put me at this particular flower shop to be in her life specifically. Today I�m pretty sure I got confirmation of that. I suppose to protect her I should be careful, but I asked her today if she had been praying for something specifically, and she told me that it was funny I should ask, because God had just put that on her heart, very heavily, last Sunday. Um, yeah, that�s a pretty obvious sign that God�s put me there for a reason, and the reason is Georgene. Wow, what an encouraging sense of purpose! I pray that I do everything God needs me to do for her. And I know I should be praying for her and her family right now.

So that was one really, really cool thing. And the other really, really cool thing that involves God�s hand in my life is that after the fire incident, Georgene called Delylah to tell her about it, and I heard her say something very encouraging about me taking initiative about it. She didn�t actually use the word �initiative,� but I heard her say, �I�m glad Stephanie was here, because�� And then I was out of hearing range. WOOHOO! I�ve always had Georgene�s support--she even let me make some rose bunches today!--and the fact that this is the second time in as many weeks that she�s commended me is SO encouraging! Not to mention the fact that we both share faith in God. WOW. I am definitely here for a reason!! It�s really incredible to me.

And finally, the last really, really cool thing that wasn�t so directly connected to God (at least not yet :) ), is that I got to ask Georgene something I�ve been dying to ask for weeks. I got to ask how to make a certain arrangement that I have seen both her and Delylah do, that I absolutely LOVE. And she gave me the full list of �ingredients� for the �recipe� (her words�LOL!) and told me that it was really funny that I liked that arrangement because she copied it from Delylah. :D Awesomeness! What�s even more awesome is that it�ll only cost me $18 with my employee discount. WOOHOO!! (It�s a $45-55 arrangement if a customer buys it from the store.)

So I�m totally totally stoked. I cannot wait to get my hands on that arrangement! :D :D :D :D I love working with flowers!!

-Stephanie

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