They say, or rather I say (I should say), that all is grace. That we are daily and forever held in God’s love and that gratitude in good times is good, but the real key to a life of peace and joy is gratitude in the not-so-good times.
This is where faith lives, where it is tested and tried and sharpened – in the trials. Big and small, major and mundane, seemingly insignificant (yeah, no this ain’t gonna matter in a thousand years or even in a couple of weeks), and the bust-your-world-apart events that crush us.
This space, of trial or frustration or pain, pause between sweet and lovely paragraphs of our lives, is where we meet our faith. Our very own faith, the realness of it (as opposed to the words we recite or the way we want it to be). Here is where we see honestly just what exactly this faith of ours is.
Or is not.
Me? I fail daily. Fall far short, far too many times. Or rather, my faith does. Because my faith’s first response to trial or problem is most definitely not to fall prostrate on the ground offering up praise to the unseen God in His all-knowing Goodness for granting me the lesson-which-is-surely-hidden in this trial.
Not even close.
And honestly? If I did, my family would probably have me committed.
Yeah, so problems. Water problems. A big fat mess, is what I got this week and really, I didn’t need it.
Does anyone ever need the mess they get?
And no, it wasn’t a bust-your-world-apart event. More like a trivial-ish trial. But still.
I really didn’t need it.
So my kitchen faucet broke. Just sort of stopped stopping, and the water it kept flowing and the whatever-it-is-that-turns-the-water-off thing that’s inside of a faucet stopped turning the water off.
I did not offer up praise.
To my credit, though, I also didn’t offer up any four letter words either. So that’s good.
In fact, I was smugly confident in my ability to fix this problem. (Given my stellar home-repair skills. Or my adequate home-repair skills. Or my wildly inaccurate assessment of my home-repair skills.)
I asked someone to run down to the basement and shut off the water to the kitchen. Because my house is ridiculous and normal things like shut-off valves being located underneath the sink in question are not something it does.
The water stopped pouring out of the faucet, and stopped spraying out of the top of the faucet. Which was good.
The shut off valve in the basement broke. Which was not good. So now we have water falling down there and it’s quickly filling the floor so a bucket is called for.
That’s when I realize that the pizzas I put in the oven are on the brink of turning into charcoal. (Yeah, I’m making dinner during all this fun.) So I have to take them out, which I do. But we have no water, and we have a 5 gallon bucket that is almost half-filled in just this short time, so I really do need to do something.
I grab my phone and proceed to call five hundred and fifty seven plumbers, but not one of them does emergency work despite the fact that their advertisements in the yellow pages or on the web clearly (CLEARLY) state that they do “EMERGENCY CALLS”.
Which just leads me to believe that their definition of “emergency” is wildly different than mine.
During all this calling and being rejected, I am still making dinner. Because, well, moms. Multi-tasking.
I head out for bottled water to take care of those pesky needs like washing your hands and brushing your teeth.
I finally do find a plumber to come stop the basement leak, the next day. He instructs me to buy a new faucet and give him a call back to have it installed. Which, not being an emergency, I figure will happen sometime next month.
And was I smugly calm and confident during this whole trivial-ish trial?
Actually, no. No, I was not. Nor, by the way, did I fall down prostrate and offer prayers of thanks. Not once. (Though I have to admit that the thought of doing it just to see the look on the plumber’s face might have been fun. Especially after he told me how much is was going to cost to fix my mess of a water mess.)
And I can’t really say that I learned anything either, to be honest.
Sometimes life is like that. Sometimes you just are handed a mess and you have to clean it up.
I will say one thing, though. I picked out a really, really nice replacement faucet for my kitchen.
So there’s that.
Small grace, but grace nonetheless.
~xo,
LuAnne
