Fontainebleau

 On February 12, 2024, my friend Ryan called and asked if I wanted to meet for drinks. He said

he had a friend he wanted me to meet.

About an hour later he called back and canceled.

I assumed the meeting simply wasn’t meant to happen that day.

Later that evening another friend invited me to a new nightclub at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Las

Vegas. Before going there we stopped at a bar for a quick drink.

While sitting there, I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time—once again, a familiar

face in an unfamiliar place.

Afterward we drove to the Fontainebleau.

Inside the hotel I stopped someone in a uniform to ask for directions to the nightclub. To my

surprise, it was Rick, a man I had worked with nearly thirty years earlier when I first moved to

Las Vegas.

Out of everyone working in that enormous hotel, I had unknowingly stopped the one person I

had known decades earlier.

But the night wasn’t finished.

When we entered the nightclub, my host introduced me to a group of people sitting at his table.

Sitting there were Ryan and the very friend he had originally planned for me to meet earlier that

day.

The meeting that had been canceled had still taken place—just in a completely different setting.

Looking back on the evening—from running into an old friend at the bar, to reconnecting with

Rick after thirty years, to unexpectedly meeting Ryan and Steve at the club—I realized once

again how intricately life’s paths can intertwine.

Each encounter reminded me that God often works quietly behind the scenes, arranging moments

we could never plan ourselves.