Sunday, May 20, 2007

Snags and Reminders

I was very proud of myself this week. There I was, booking car, plane, train, and hotel reservations, making definite progress on this Europe trip. Then Saturday came and I found out I had gone over my credit limit. In my head, my credit card had a large enough limit to handle the costs of my trip. And it does. However, I have been booking trains and hotels for several people. That makes a difference.

First response: horror, even worse than the horror of being late returning a library book. Second response: panic--my entire trip was going to fall through, and the reservations I'd placed were all worthless, and we'd have to book new hotels at higher prices, and everybody was going to be so mad at me. Third response: Suzanne, you're supposed to have it more together than this!

Tonight at church the guest pastor preached on our weaknesses, and how God makes use of them to broadcast His strengths to us and to the watching world. I was sitting there, half paying attention and half trying to solve all the Europe problems in my head, and suddenly I thought: "Control freak."

Blast.

That one again.

Nowhere in all of yesterday's reactions to the news of the credit problem did I stop to pray about it. I mean, really. Pray about hotel reservations? Come on. God has bigger problems. This is one of those things I can handle this on my own. What does He even care?

The part of me that acknowledges that I'm not quite as independent as I act most times knows that He does care, even about relatively minor things. And this is relatively minor. This is not a scenario in which someone died (or even could have died) because I didn't do math properly.

So there's a wrench in my plans, and tomorrow I'm going to be working on getting it out. And on remembering that from an ultimate perspective, they're not really my plans, anyway.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good reminder to all of us to first cast our cares on the Lord in prayer knowing that He, indeed, does care for us and every aspect of our lives. He is full of tender mercies and compassions that are new every morning. Great is His faithfulness! (Loved the comment about these verses being found in the middle of Lamentations.)

Praise the Lord for once again reminding us of who He is!

III John 4