I saw an old man pulling a beat-up shopping cart up the street. He looked like he should be home playing with a grandchild instead of rearranging his collection of bags, which hung like ornaments from both sides of the cart. Every few yards he would stop and recheck each bag. That's how life plays out when one's entire earthly belongings are stuffed into bags meant for garbage.
That very same day, Nick's truck wouldn't start, my washer quit working, and my five-year-old computer sputtered to a slow death. Since his employer closed down two months ago, we felt pretty hammered by it all. But you know what? Within seconds of each inconvenience, we thanked God for his faithfulness. These couldn't have happened at a worst time, but they weren't life-shattering events, either.
Life-shattering is the grandmother whose thirty-something grandson is dying of bone cancer. It's the family who is being evicted through no wrong of their own, after their landlord failed to make payments on the house for several months. It's children raising children in a country where half the parents have died of AIDS.
The truck can be fixed. I have a new washer, thanks to a perfectly timed sale at Home Depot. And I was able to find an affordable computer to replace the old. As I was setting preferences on my new Mac, I chose this image of the world as my screen background. It reminds me to keep things in perspective no matter what life brings, and to always remember that God is in control of every detail.
Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. - Psalm36:5 (NIV)
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