So Thankful God Said No

God finally answered my prayer.  After what seemed like an eternity, He recently said yes to my request for the Big Thing. 

It doesn't really matter what the Big Thing was - maybe it was healing, a financial breakthrough, a baby, a job, or some other change in circumstance.  Regardless, I'm sure you can relate to needing something, then praying, waiting, and nothing happening.  It leaves you feeling like God is either ignoring you or punishing you for wanting it too badly.

Needlessly Falling Down

My mother-in-law stood at the top of the stairs holding my daughter's hand.  Before they could come down, I said, "Hold up, let me tell you what happened the other day."

View from the top

I jogged up the stairs and began explaining how my daughter had almost slipped down the stairs two weeks before.  But I wasn't content to just tell the story - no, I needed to re-enact it.

I stood at the top and demonstrated how Rudy slipped off the highest step, almost losing her balance - except at this point, I actually did lose my balance.  The next thing I knew, I was flailing down the stairs and careened to a halt with both sets of toes jammed into the doorposts at the bottom.

My daughter was crying at the top of the stairs, and I feared she had been hurt in the kerfuffle.  But then I realized she was crying because on my way down, I had somehow pulled her Easter basket off her arm and dragged it down with me.

Driving a Moving Truck on the Water

I thought I'd learned to trust God, that I was over worrying, that I had reached some peak in my spiritual walk.  Then last Friday happened.

All I had to do was drive a moving truck 269 miles and get it to our new home by 5:00 p.m.  But then things went terribly wrong, due to a bad call by the moving company.  We didn't have a big enough truck to haul all of our things, and we ended up having to hitch a 12-foot trailer onto the back.

What should have been a three-hour packing job took eight hours and required us to force feed our valuables into the truck and trailer.  In the end, I left a few hundred dollars' worth of our belongings behind and pulled out of the driveway at 5:30 p.m., right at the peak of rush-hour traffic.

I uttered a prayer and began my faithless journey down the highway.