For luck

It came in a tiny brown envelope, by air mail. My name and the Catholic Herald address scrawled across the envelope, a stamp bearing the image of the Queen placed in the upper right hand corner, a hand-drawn cross with a heart kitty corner from it.

"FRAGILE-- HANDLE WITH CARE."

The handwriting was unfamiliar, but the message inside had already been echoing across the Atlantic Ocean for the past several weeks.

Amy,

These are from me, to wish you and Seth the best of luck.

Love,

David

Carefully pressed in a white piece of paper, lay two four-leaf clovers, and two bookmarks, bearing their image, and in a foreign language, "Seek, and you will find."

Wow.

I'm not sure if I've ever seen a real four-leaf clover in my entire life, much less two of them, until yesterday. And now here they sit, tucked safely away in that brown envelope, only to be removed when I have the time to sit and stare at them in sheer wonder.

I suppose I should give one of them to Seth too.

If there's one thing I've taken note of, it's the lack of thoughtfulness in the online dating realm. Both Catholic and secular. The "Not Interested" button. The "Other" option for closing a match on eHarmony. The ability to hide yourself from another person's searches when you just don't want to deal with them.

It would've been easy to do all of that to David (or The Shamrock Shakira as perhaps you better know him...although a four-leaf clover is technically not a shamrock). He's got 16 years on me. He committed a dating faux pas and signed his first correspondence to me with "love." Phone conversations across the pond are not really an option. Physically he's not my type. But it was his thoughtfulness that struck me, that had me hitting the reply button. That realization on his part, the, "Hey, I'm probably not what you're looking for. But I'll pray for you anyway."

And now, two months since that very first email that sent me into tweak out mode, I receive one of the most thoughtful presents anyone has ever given me-- from someone that's a relative stranger.

If that's not the Holy Spirit, I don't know what is.