When I was in college I worked for the city of Albany Parks Department. My partner that first summer was another college student. She and I were responsible for all of the flowers in all of the parks and for various other jobs such as watering the grass and cutting down the weeds. Over the course of the summer we felt like that there was a conspiracy against us to make our jobs impossible. Perhaps we were actually on a hidden camera show. We would put a sprinkler is the ground and get sprayed in the face with water because it was malfunctioning. We would be unable to start the weedeater and take it back to the shop only to have it spring to life when one of the guys picked it up. We tried to right a tipped bucket only to discover it was filled with something so heavy we couldn’t manage it.
This past Sunday I felt like the conspiracy had struck again. The Tacoma bridge was closed meaning folks from the west side would have to take a 15 minute detour to get to the SFC house. The street in front of the house was closed for more than a block as the city ground off the pavement to get ready for repaving. The final straw was when I cut open my finger on the lid of the sour cream as I was making the breakfast casserole. Despite all my best efforts I was convinced that no one would come and brunch would be a disaster.
Luckily I was born with a strong “the show must go on” gene. I shed a few frustrated tears, sent an angsty text to my husband, and then I put on some of my favorite tunes to have a little dance party as I cleaned and finished preparing bread dough. Brunch turned out to be fantastic. We had 12 folks including someone brand-new to us. We made gluten-free communion bread together as we talked about Jesus as the bread of life.
In new start work and in life it can be so easy to feel like the deck is stacked against us. There are things that happen that are beyond our control, like street works, that just seem to make everything more difficult. I’ve found that laughing at myself helps when things are a bit disastrous and that when I am sure of the outcome I need to keep going anyway because God often swoops in with some kind of surprise.
So on the days when everything goes wrong I will continue to look for God at work and be ready for awesomeness right after I cry and clean up the spilt milk and broken eggs! I believe that this is the real conspiracy at work against us. The conspiracy of a God that brings light into our darkness and beautiful disruption into lives.
-Eilidh
| This also happened on Sunday morning |
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