Excuse me? Excuse-yes? Yes, I’m ready to order. I’d like a cholesterol free life experience, you know what I mean? I don’t want to have heart troubles or feel sluggish. I need to be in peak shape so that I can run the good race, can’t have any heavy stuff weighing me down. So, if you don’t mind, could I have my life made with No Yokes, please?

If you’ve ever placed an order like this, I can relate. Recently at work there was a cafaffle about a locked door. The fact that the printer was behind it was most of the trouble, the reasons of which are largely inconsequential, and I needed to use that printer. Imagine having to waste the time it takes to unlock a door, purposelessly, a hundred times a day to get anything off the printer when you’re doing casework and have to get things off the printer all the time, constantly, ad nauseum, ad infinitim. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, does it? Probably isn’t; Not the point. The point IS that come Monday morning this week, after doing this for about two months, I had Had Enough. I was livid and decided to act like a child. I purposely went in and UNlocked the door at every opportunity hoping that it would stay that way, and when that didn’t work, I just left it standing open. I figured  two could play that whole Drive-Someone-Crazy-About-Something-As-Inane-As-A-Locked-Door Game (What? You’ve never played that one?). I fumed and complained and made a real jerk of myself.

But then something happened. A coworker of mine who was the dumping ground for my vitriol did something that absolutely changed my perspective and my attitude: She prayed for me. I didn’t know it at the time. I had gone outside for a minute to take a break from my rage with a book that just happened to be in my purse called Forgotten God, which is about being guided by the Holy Spirit. Ouch, by the way. And as I read, I thought, Is this Love I’m acting with? Or Selfishness?

And it occurred to me that I was angry because I didn’t have a choice about the way things were being run in my office, but I was being offered a choice about how I was going to run things in my heart and how that heart was reflected in my actions. And I decided I was going to submit to God and run it right, in a way that would please Him and make me, as His representative, be honorable to the great gifts I’d been given, like having the Holy Spirit to dwell within me and guide me. Like having a job, like having the capabilities to work it, like having the income it provides me to support myself, like having all the luxuries in life that make it not only possible but to seem even justifiable to complain. I realized that I couldn’t do anything about the yoke, but I could carry it with dignity and the grace befitting someone who professes Jesus as Lord.

So as I was saying earlier, if you want a life with No Yokes? Good luck finding anyplace that can fill that particular order. But if you care about your heart really, you will (as I am still continuing to) learn to bear them with courage, humilty, and above all else, Love.

So I’ve been blue and mopey. I’ve been whiny and inconsolable. And, I’ve been desperate and unhappy.

I am SO lame.

Understandable? Sure. Justified? Debatable. But righteous? I doubt it.

This morning I had breakfast with my grandparents. And with my grandfather ill, my gramma explained to me that she’s had about all she can handle. And I thought to myself, I can be of some use to her. I can minister to her as I’m waiting. I’m so daft sometimes, thinking that ministry and missions have to always be Over There Somewhere, when there are people with needs not only right down the street but in my own family. And there is a peace in that because there is direction in it. So maybe I don’t flee the country sometime soon. Maybe for the moment I’m needed here.

God’s plan is not always (read: ever) what I think it will be. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is absolutely Good. Not necessarily what I think would be good, not always what I would ask for myself. Not even what is “good” for me in this moment, but the Ultimate Good. There is something so comforting in that, and it is in comfort that I learn more and more to trust Him. There is something so humbling in that, and it is in humility that I learn how better to praise the God who was and is and is to come.

I am happy. For now. But more importantly, I feel joy.

I think I need to go on a European tour. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to use this guy as my travel agent.

There’s really no need to go. The only reason that I’m even contemplating it is because I’m disappointed. How, you may ask? And I answer, In myself.

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I ask myself, When did you begin to grow? Was it when everything fell apart or did it start before?

There seems to me to be a piece of everything that’s happened in everything that came before. Nothing simply appeared. If I hadn’t gone to a sleepover in seventh grade at the house of a girl I didn’t know very well. If I hadn’t been at a certain Bible study my first week of college. If that other boy hadn’t been bitter, if she hadn’t thrown me that surprise 20th birthday party. It was all so tenuous. It could have all turned out differently. But it didn’t. And this evidence reminds me that God’s plan is sometimes interwoven so by little things that it may seem at times as though nothing at all is happening. But then something will happen, like a couple offering to raise your child and give her the home that you would have wanted for her, and looking back, all the steps will come together.

And this is what I need to keep sight of.

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So tonight as I was wandering around online (Read: Wasting time looking up names on Google to see what it would come up with. (Oh, man, I’m not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition, am I? . . . I mean, “With what up it might come.”)), and I stumbled across a advert for a documentary/film made by some people who want to expose the good work God is doing in the lives of young people. (The link is here if you want to check them out.)

And of course, that sounds like a really really good thing that I could totally get behind. I mean, encouraging believers to get off their keesters and start doing something for the Kingdom of God? Beautiful. Wonderful. And bringing those acts to light for the rest of the Body to witness? Encouraging. Inspiring. Three years ago I would have immediately linked to their site, ordered the DVD, read all of their organization-related literature, and have already set about making homemade Tshirts with their name and slogan on them in sloppy handwriting. I’d have driven my sister crazy by beginning all my sentences with “The people at Broken Voices say. . . ” and my brother to distraction by ending all my explanations with “. . . at least that’s what they say at Broken Voices.” But I find myself changed. I’m much slower in my patronage.

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