New Week

   As my life took on the hue of a Monday morning, I was reminded how fresh and promising a new week can seem.  We had a rather unusual weekend with our college son getting stuck in Columbus, Ohio on Saturday en route home for his spring break.  His car broke down, but what evolved from that was a God-appointed chain of events that even he would not trade in for a smooth ride.  He saw clear evidence of God working all along the way.  That's an entire blog post in and of itself.

   Saturday was a day of storms.  These were not cozy-up-by-the-fire-with-a-book storms.  These were batten down the hatches/tie everything down you own storms.  Destruction rode on the roaring wind that pushed the heavy rain sideways for hours.  Trees that had been standing for 30 years are standing no more; most roads became closed due to flooding and impassability.

  Today we clean up the debris and check the weather forecast only to see that it will be in the mid-60's and blue skies by the end of the week.  What looks gray and dismal and dismantled around us now will soon be swept away by cleanup crews and sunshine.  And next weekend when we're out trimming the garden or taking one of the first walks of spring we'll look back on this weekend before and recall how nasty it all was; how we felt caught in the clutches of a raging hurricane that we thought surely would be the end of us all.

Wouldn't it be nice to have an emotional forecast?  That if you felt down in the dumps on Monday, you could check and see how you'd be doing Thursday and know whether you should schedule that lunch with a friend or not?  If I've learned nothing else so far in 2010, I've learned that I never know what a day will bring, and that my life (and the lives of those around me) can change dramatically between breakfast and dinner.

I'm learning to ride the roller coaster that is life and human emotion.  I've come to learn that joy is a separate issue; it stems and gets fed from a relationship with God that does not change or waver unlike so many other things around me.  Joy, contentment, peace- these things can remain even when the rain is blowing sideways into my plans and the roar of the accompanying wind deafens my ears.  It takes the school of hard knocks to learn these things sometimes, but learn them I will.  This is education money can't buy...you just have to live it.