Suggestion Box

At Whit's End, Connie Kendall, the shop's new manager, pries open a long-locked suggestion box so she can put it back out on the counter and hear from her customers. Inside, she and her friend Penny Bassett find a stack of old suggestions from years ago, most of them silly, like putting live llamas in the Bible Room. But three slips in the same handwriting stop Penny cold: requests for kiwi lime ice cream, artwork by Claude Lorraine, and a baking contest like the TV show Back Shelf Bake Off. Every one of them matches Penny's own favorite things exactly. Stunned by the idea that she might have a clone somewhere in Odyssey, Penny declares she has to find this mysterious "serial suggestor."

Meanwhile, a boy named Wyatt is happily filling the new suggestion box with twenty-seven ideas of his own, from beanbag chairs to daily tornado drills to a doomsday club for practicing for the end of the world. When his older sister Bridget arrives to pick him up, she reads his suggestions and calls him weird. She tells him that since he's a Christian now, he's supposed to change and be normal, because nobody will listen to someone they don't understand. Shaken, Wyatt asks his friend Sophie whether Christians have to be normal; she doesn't know, since she isn't one. Before he leaves, he asks her to throw all his suggestions away.

Penny's hunt for her double grows sillier by the day. She barges onto Connie's radio program, Candid Conversations with Connie, to beg listeners for tips. She runs the handwriting through a phone app that declares the writer a free spirit hiding "a sinister nature" who craves chaos and mayhem and would sooner harm a butterfly than admire it. She even asks Connie to scan the slips into the Imagination Station or hand them to the police for fingerprinting, both of which Connie flatly refuses.

Wyatt, meanwhile, takes Bridget's advice to heart in his own odd way. He studies an old, cheesy Christian TV drama to learn how Christians are supposed to talk. The next day at Whit's End he tries it out, ordering ice cream with, "If it be the Lord's will, I'll take a small cup of vanilla," calling the school bus his mission field, and turning a rotten-banana smell into a sermon about sin. Sophie finally asks, "Why are you talking like you just swallowed a Bible?" and walks off, leaving Wyatt confused about what being normal even means.

When Wyatt guesses that Penny is searching for her look-alike so she won't feel so weird, Penny surprises him: it's the exact opposite. She likes being unique, she says. God made her the way she is, and she's hunting for this person hoping to discover they're different from her after all, because she wants to believe God only made one Penny. Just then Wooton arrives and recognizes the old suggestions instantly, because he wrote them. Back before he and Penny were married, when he had a crush on her, he slipped in ideas she would love, hoping Connie would use them and Penny would spend more time at the shop. He disguised his handwriting by using his opposite hand, which, he admits, he can never quite keep under control. Penny is touched, and relieved: she really is the only Penny in the world.

Wooton then shows Wyatt something special: a pretend doomsday bunker made of blankets, stocked with a first aid kit, gas masks, comic books, kazoos, and confetti cannons. He built it because he loved a certain suggestion from the box, the doomsday club, which turns out to be Wyatt's own idea that Sophie never threw away. When Wyatt worries that people will think the club is weird, Wooton shrugs it off; he just wants to be exactly who God made him. He tells Wyatt about Asher, a quiet boy from their Sunday school class who never talked to anyone, until the day Wooton taught a lesson on temptation while wearing a ridiculous beekeeper suit that Penny had suggested. Afterward Asher, who loves everything about bees, tried on the helmet, opened up for the first time, and became Wooton's good friend. "I think God uses our weirdness," Wooton explains; He even gives it to us on purpose so He can use us.

Just then Sophie appears, thrilled by the club flyer, and reveals she once spent twenty-seven hours in a bunker she built in her own bedroom. As the three of them get ready to practice for the end of the world, Wyatt asks if anyone else will come. Probably not, Wooton says cheerfully, "Because God doesn't let just anybody be weird."