It Could Be Worse ...

Treasured friend,

We've had some week in our neck of the woods. Tornadoes. Downed trees and live power lines on the ground. Power outages -- ours lasted 65 hours; a few others in our neighbhorhood went even longer than that. And more storms are on the way today.

I sprained my wrist from pulling the starter on our portable generator (which eventually did generate enough power to keep Dad's meds cool in the fridge and the basement dry). Dad fell and is now limping after missing the bottom stair in the dark (while I was out on the patio trying to start said generator). We moped in darkness for three days and three nights--running short on patience, and shorter on the necessities of life. And we found ourselves wondering how Abe Lincoln studied by candlelight to become a lawyer, and how Noah's wife and daughters-in-law survived cooped up in that dark ark for 40 days and 40 nights.

We decided that none of us would make good (or happy) campers at this stage of our lives. (Come to think of it, when we did camp in our earlier lives, we weren't very happy campers then, either!)

Then we went to church yesterday to find that a dear friend and fellow caregiver suffered a tree through the roof in our same storm--and our predicament didn't seem so bad. Everyone, it seemed, had an equally challenging story to share.

Now that the power is back on, I finally got to scrolling through the endless emails (do you know how many can accumulate in 65 hours??) in my box. Among them I found an ad for this book that apparently is on Oprah's book club list for the summer: Someday This Will Be Funny.

Now, I haven't read the book (probably won't, actually), but the title gave me pause.

What a great way to look at the crises of a week like this one ... someday we'll laugh about this, or at least we won't be crying/fretting/stressing about it anymore. Someday so many of the things I consider major deals today will fade into oblivion and may even be a source of a chuckle or a to-the-bottom-of-the-toes laugh.

I don't see it yet, of course, but I can look in faith to that one day. After all, as the opening line of Hebrews 11 reminds us, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (v. 1; ESV). I have faith that even this series of setbacks--and the many others of a more serious nature that we've experienced in the last year--don't come as a surprise to our loving Father. We can have faith that in all this He is at work. We can have absolute assurance that one day we will sit beside Him, review it all, and see how He worked in it to accomplish the best. We can also have the assurance that from that vantage point in eternity we'll admit (even if grudgingly) that some of it was actually a little funny.

I pray a hearty laugh for you today, no matter what else happens. Please pray the same for me.

Blessings and prayers,

Julie

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