Morning Lord! I’m sneaking a bit of time to spend with you while Nathan re-enacts the game he played with Jacob yesterday. I’m off to Bible Study this afternoon and I find myself having feelings similar to those I usually experience on a Sunday morning – of wanting to be close to you and know that all is well between us in case I expose myself as being the pathetic Christian that I am to the outside world.
Still, no one is perfect! Just look at yesterday, Lord. There’s Andrew, home on time – for which I was very grateful – until he ended up spending an hour of the evening on the phone talking to Cameron. Not only that, he’s invited Cameron to come and have dinner with us on Saturday night, without asking me first, which means that I have a birthday party to run tomorrow afternoon, a dinner to organise for Dad and Emily for tomorrow evening and now dinner the next night as well! What is it with men and making invitations without checking?
I also saw Abigail yesterday outside those shops right across from school, positively shouting at their eldest son Joshua. Not so much of the model pastor’s wife was showing there, I will say. Quite what he had done I couldn’t work out, especially since he always seems a very nice kid to me, and at his age (maybe sixteen?) a bit too old to be yelled at like a two year old I would have thought. Anyway, whatever he’d done, she was livid. Of course when she saw me and realised I was watching her face returned to its usual semi-lacquered stiffness and she gave me a friendly wave, but it did serve to remind me of two things. Firstly, no one is perfect, even if they are desperate for you to think that, and secondly, you really do have no idea whatsoever what goes on in other people’s lives when you aren’t watching.
Sometimes I feel pretty lost about my life, Lord. It’s like what Paul said in Romans: “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing.”
If someone like Paul can feel this way, maybe there’s hope for me yet, Lord. Be patient with me as I figure this out, Lord! If he had any great secrets, I would love to know them.
And I pray you would be with me over these next couple of days with the party, the dinner and the dinner all on the horizon. I shouldn’t really be going to Bible Study this afternoon, but working on party preparation so I pray you would help me get ready anyway, and honour my choice to put you first.
I pray all in the name of Jesus…Amen