OOPS! I’ve been working so hard on my next book’s deadline that I didn’t share my (in)courage post with you! Here’s a snippet:
“It seems like everything is going wrong,” he said, discouragement evident in his tone and written on his face. Still wearing his office clothes, sweat soaked through my husband’s button-down shirt, and dust and grass covered his black dress shoes from multiple trips between our basement and the air conditioning units outside.
The night before school starts is always crazy. Our children attend and I tutor at a Classical Conversations program once a week; we’ve been there for years. Usually, there’s chaos because we can’t find all the books for the new school year or figure out what to pack for lunch, but this was different: the fan in one of our AC units stopped spinning and the wall in my son’s room felt so hot the outlet cover had begun to discolor. With daytime highs in the 90s, the house was miserably hot. Plus, we were becoming afraid of an electrical fire in our son’s room.
Sometimes it makes my husband crazy that I assume he can fix anything. Usually he proves me right, but I know it’s a lot of pressure. However, an hour after arriving home, he had switched out the outlet box in my son’s room, installed a new capacitor in the AC unit (in honor of our 80s heritage we call it a flux capacitor), and the air coming through our vents was cooler than we’d felt in months. A week earlier, he had fixed the dishwasher when it suddenly quit filling with water. Our leaky washing machine is next on his honey-do list.
A friend once told her husband if he came home and everything looked the same as when he left, she’d done a lot; she’d managed to maintain. We worship a God of logic and order, but for us, entropy — a lack of order or predictability or a gradual decline into disorder — is usually the name of the game.
Things fall apart.
Please join me at (in)courage for the rest of the post, where we take the time to appreciate our daily graces.
