Seriously. I’ve already been laughed at for the better part of Sunday. Even my family, who should have at least shown a little concern, has gotten some good guffaws out of me today. But I think the last laugh went to God, because He showed me something about answered prayer that I never expected to see in my little Sunday morning adventure.
My daughter (who turned seven on Friday), wanted to see the Perseids shower. I set the alarm for 3:15 and we climbed out of bed and headed for the deck. As I pulled the door shut behind us, I realized something sort of important. Bet you can guess right now what it was. Yep. The door was locked. So there we are, at 3:15 AM, in our pajamas, stuck outside of the house with the dog. Hm. Now, our neighbor has a key for such emergencies, but it didn’t seem quite fair to go ringing her doorbell at 3:15 on a Sunday morning and dragging her, her kids, and her dogs out of bed. Well, we were going to be outside watching meteors anyway, so it wouldn’t hurt to lay on our deck chairs for a couple of hours longer, right? She gets up at 6:30, so it wasn’t like we’d be trapped outside forever.
Not a bad idea. Until… it started to lightning. Okay. Fine. At this point, we trekked around to the truck (which, I truly thank God for this, has a keypad on the door) and looked for something to spring the back door lock with. Tried a CD, since that was all we had. Yeah. No go. Too brittle. Lightning’s getting closer. Guess we’ll sleep in the truck. (Are we having fun yet?) Dozed until just after sunrise when my daughter sat up and said, “Hey, look! At the end of the road! There’s a dog that looks just like ours!” Nope. That was our dog. He managed to escape the backyard, collarless, and was taking a tour of the neighborhood. At 6:00 in the morning. Guess who had to traipse up the road in their pj’s to collar said animal? Oh, the joy.
But, all’s well that end’s well. Our neighbor came out early to get her paper, we faced her poorly-concealed laughter, and decided that, since we were up anyway, we might as well go to early church. End of story.
Or, is it? Because, you see, I can have a bit of a temper when I’m not in control. I get frustrated. The levels go off the charts until I snap and either accuse, yell, or cry. And I’ve been doing some praying about that–in fact, I’ve been begging Him to make some changes in me–but frankly, the results haven’t been so great. Until last night. God sort of stopped me when I was getting ready for church and said, “Did you notice that? You never got mad. You never blamed anybody. You never stomped your feet or cried or got scared or any of that stuff. In fact, if you admit it, you kind of sort of found the whole thing very amusing.” Hm. True. All true. And it wasn’t because I fought to stay in control, it was because there was nothing I could do but accept the situation. I got really excited. Not because I did something, but because God did. God answered my prayer. Can I say that again? God answered my prayer. I love, love, love when there is a tangible answer, one I can put my finger on and say, “That’s IT!”
Want to hear the ultimate irony? After all of that, guess how many meteors we saw. Uhm, zero. And do you know what our daughter said? “Camping out in the truck was so much fun!” I think my friend Christina had it right. She’ll remember that forever. Thank you God, for a pretty cool (and yes, funny) memory.
-JB
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