This week…started rough.
After taking last week off for vacation, I forgot to turn my alarms back on. (Yes, plural. I have three) Thus, I overslept and barely made it to work on time, and I definitely didn’t have time to eat breakfast.
This has only happened once before in the fast-approaching two years that I’ve been in the office. After the first time, I added numerous steps to keep it from happening again. (Thus, the plural alarms.) And it didn’t.
Until Tuesday.
What made the situation even more unfortunate was that I was picking up extra hours at my other job this week, so I was scampering straight from one job to another. And I didn’t have time to grab lunch.
I was, at the risk of stating the obvious, quite hungry.
I was saved by my mother and a sandwich at about noon, but the whole experience has made me even more paranoid about missing my alarms. It’s also made me think: how often do things go wrong at the most inconvenient time possible?
Now, there usually isn’t a convenient time for things to go wrong, but there are definitely better times than others. Such as last year, when the printer stopped working on me rather abruptly. (I think I wrote a Secretary’s Corner mentioning it…) I believe it glitched on me the week of Church in the Park, when I didn’t need to print any bulletins. So that was a good time to have the technology fail.
And then there are times like this past January. The office got a new printer – the week I needed to print AGM booklets. Arguably the biggest printing job of the year. I was terrified that it was going to give me trouble, as new printers of often do, during that print. It didn’t, but I feel like that sort of thing has happened often enough that it’s a rational fear.
Where am I going with this, talking about printers?
Sometimes with the most important things in life, the things that can go wrong, do go wrong. It can be so tricky to figure out why things go wrong. Especially as Christians making decisions and seeking to follow the Lord in those decisions.
There’s a reality that sometimes God closes a door to tell us no, or not yet. It can seem like our plans are falling to pieces, but really God’s plan is better. We just can’t see it yet.
However, it’s also a reality that there is an enemy in this world who wants to steal, kill, and destroy. So when we make decisions to follow the Father’s heart, there might be some backlash.
So how do we tell the difference? How can we tell if God is closing a door, or if the enemy is trying to shut us down?
I don’t really have the answers. By now this is probably obvious. My little ramblings aren’t always theological. There is probably a theological answer for this. But what I would say, what my gut instinct is, would be to pray about it. Making decisions with God is a life-long learning process. So we pray our way through.
