Yesterday I was ready to walk out the door after attending a women’s conference in Holmes County, OH. One lady told me goodbye and said, “I’d like to sit with you awhile because I think you have lots of stories behind you.” I told her she can read the stories on my blog, but right now I live a very normal life with no exciting stories. I was shaking my head and chuckling, surprised at how odd but fine it felt to say that.

For so long, I was the girl who lives far away and has Adventures. Now that girl lives in the sticks of gray PA and has no sweet little grandmas pressing money into her hand for fish for Christmas, and doesn’t fall into (many) atrocious language mishaps. Her car shimmies badly and gets dirty, and her orchid is pushing buds. Every day, she has very honest discussions with God and quiet, deep chats with people , but none of that stuff is story material or blog-able.

She has a lot of Thoughts and wonders about a lot of things.

• Someone needs to write a Mennonite philosophy of the body.
• What is to be done with songs with lines like “send grief or pain” or “I’ll trade sunshine for rain, comfort for pain–that’s what I’ll be willing to do”–when no sane person would say any of that.
• What does it mean to mirror God’s image of creativity in us?
• We can observe the ripples of traceable influence from Amy Carmichael to Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, but who’s next? Who will the next Christian heroes be? Are we walking among them now? How will their stories be preserved to influence and shape the next generation?
• How can we come to understand more deeply the profound impact of words, and how they give life or death? How do words exercise man’s dominion over the created world, which includes the spirit world?

But none of that translates into stories. Hence the silence here.

But something funny did happen to me this weekend, and it makes a story to laugh about, and it was a little adventure.

The conference I went to asked me to speak in one session, and reserved a room at a nice hotel–one much nicer than the kind I reserve when I’m paying. The girl at the desk gave me the key and instructions, I found the room, swiped the key, and stepped in.

I saw lights turned on and clothes  and an open suitcase and I knew there would be a body on the bed. In the half second it took to assess the situation, I backed straight out, walked downstairs, and told the check in girl. She had no idea what was going on, and looked terrified and bewildered. She said someone had checked out of that room earlier in the day, didn’t know why someone was in there, and had no extra room to give me because they were booked full that night. I knew (but didn’t say) that we had an Agatha Christy plot on our hands. She gave me the employee’s restroom and I changed and left for the evening session. I couldn’t quite relax all evening. I knew a reputable business would take care of me, but still.

When I returned  hours later, the same girl was still there, falling over herself with apologies. The conference organizers had made two room reservations for two of us speakers. The check-in girl had given the other speaker the room with my name. That girl had already left when I came, so there would have been no body on the bed, but oddly enough, she said it went through her mind that she’s always a neat freak, but this time someone will come in and see the mess she left.

To compensate for the mix-up, the hotel gave me a $25 gift card for a local business I’ll probably never patronize, but it was awfully kind of them. Human error can happen anywhere, and happily we could laugh about it.