Many years ago I acquired an ashtray. I don’t know for sure where it came from, but presumably from an aunt and uncle who owned an antique store and would go to auctions and buy boxes of things that mostly contained junk just so as to acquire the things in the box that they knew were valuable and then to share the junk they didn’t want with family. And just to note, it was the hospitable thing back in those days to have ashtrays in your home for people who visited who smoked, not that my parents smoked and I personally have an aversion to smoking. I’m not sure why it was among my toys. Maybe there had been something interesting to me about the ashtray that had led me to keeping it.

The ashtray stayed at my parents’ home after I became an adult and was out of mind, until sometime after we were relocated out of Missouri for the first time, to Duluth, Minnesota in July 1993. One day I recalled about the ashtray. And the reason I recalled about the ashtray is because the ashtray is the State of Minnesota. We only lived in Minnesota at that time for eight months, before being relocated with my then husband’s work back to Missouri, six months later relocated to Iowa where we lived two and a half years, before being relocated to the Willmar, Minnesota area. I think it was likely after the second time being located to Minnesota that that ashtray I had acquired as a child especially started to have meaning to me.

Here for whatever reason I had kept all those years an ashtray of Minnesota, which is rather unique, having had no idea in my younger years of life that I would ever live in Minnesota. I’m sure I never gave the state a second thought. And yet, twice I was located to Minnesota, and have now lived in Kandiyohi, Minnesota for 23 and a half years.

I like to look for meaning in things and look for God in things, because I do believe that God has a plan for our lives, a plan we often don’t recognize and for sure rarely have forethought regarding. In 2007 I found the ashtray at my parents’ home and brought it to my home and hung it on the wall in my bedroom as a reminder that I am where I am supposed to be.

Isaiah 55:8-9 Living Bible (TLB): "This plan of mine is not what you would work out, neither are my thoughts the same as yours! For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than yours, and my thoughts than yours."

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