Top Stories for Your Morning

Monday morning. My phone gives me this line every morning. It’s there right away when I check the time. It’s a fine line because it always reminds me that the top story I am up for in the morning is the one where I ask God to “please be with our day. Bless Elv and keep him safe and be with his thoughts and decisions. And please help me to have a good day.” My brain and heart need God’s grace as my own top story for the day.

Last week was a week of what I began to refer to as “dead ends”. Like this one: I had decided to fly to Idaho for a visit to my parents and family there. I had kept an eye out for an affordable ticket since Christmas time and thought I had it figured out. Till last week when I was finally equipped with money to purchase there were no tickets within my budget. None. Dead End.

It snowed a lot last week, too. Even though winter isn’t, without it, all that beautiful snow made logging more like snow plowing than logging. In fact, the guys found they were “snowed in” on the job at the end of the one day and still had to do a repair on the plow before they could plow out to the main road to come home. Ten o’clock in the evening is too late for a nice, cozy fireside supper and evening. Besides, there were firewood chores and more snowplowing to do, yet. Or still. Depends on your dialect.

I can complain in any dialect when it comes to bombed evenings. Elv gets quite annoyed at me sometimes. I can’t say I blame him much. Who wants to fight snow and repairs all day and half the evening only to come home to a grouchy wife and more undone chores? I’ll be honest, my story feels more valid by 10PM than it really should and I’m not good at cheer, so to speak, after about the third lost evening. Actually, not even after the first. I want what I want. And it ain’t purty. I promise myself after sanity reappears to never be that baby-ish again, ever.

All week our endeavors were linked to being ready for company on the weekend. We were both excited about this company, truly. I cleaned and polished our digs, shopped for just the right groceries, and prepared the guest cabin happily. Nevertheless, true to the theme of the week, when Elv turned the water on for the cabin, the water didn’t come. At all. Even though he had carefully blown the pipes empty so they wouldn’t freeze; they were now frozen. True story.

We had a good time with Steve’s anyway. We talked fast to get caught up. But mostly we laughed. Nell loves to laugh. Laughter is healing and relaxing. It was a perfect balm for my weary soul.

I found a verse last week in the middle of the dead ends. It is good that one should Hope and Wait Quietly for the salvation of the Lord. Lamentations 3:26. So I threw this rope out to my drowning self, deciding that God could fix things any way He chose and I WOULD be good with whatever that was. Elv’s instruction to me one morning came in words out loud. “Don’t go off into depression, okay?” It felt like a rebuff at the time, but I knew, even then, in my head that it was a plea for both of us to not cave into discouragement.

In the end, there are always reasons to be grateful for our own known trials and tribulations. It’s only temporary stuff and most of it we bring on ourselves through our own humanness. Besides, things are always better in the morning.