Categories: uncategorized
Date: 08 March 2006 22:14:42
It feels as though I am being tested to breaking point at the moment. I will not crack, though... God won't let me crack.
My nice easy night has just gone for a burton. Lovely expression, that! I was planning to get Dad off to bed early (him being worn out from the hospice and still feeling really quite poorly) and then crawl into my bed myself. I felt the need to curl up and pull the duvet over my head. To say nothing of needing to rest my body which has finally started to tell me about the battle I had holding my baby tight last night so that he wouldn't hurt himself or me.
It's been a day which has really quite battered me one way or another, though the hospice were quite wonderful about Dad's sickness (changes in medication and full investigations into the cause). I got the bill for the windscreen wiper motor for my car - £278!!!! And nothing to see for it, of course, as is always the way with cars. I must admit I felt quite physically sick myself when I got the bill.
The this afternoon the very nice window and door man arrived to measure up and give me a quote for a new door. It has to be a complete door, and the side windows to match, because the old door is basically losing its grip on life as well as not conforming to building regulations one little bit. I knew that. So Mr nice window and door man did his bit with tape measure and calculator and then told me to sit down and take a deep breath. Just short of £1000 !!! He was very nice, no hard sell at all, recommended I get other quotes and recommended a company that does very low interest loans for home improvements, and left me to think about it and get back in touch if I wanted to go ahead. £1000! I have shown Tiddles the estimate, just to make a point. Turns out they've been helping themselves to my money for quite a while. Looks like it will all backfire on them now as I think our annual holiday may have to be sacrificed to make a point. But I am reeling at the cost. I'll find the money, and as I said, the cost of repair is only because I am fortunate enough to run a car and have a home. But I still feel shellshocked.
And now Dad has had a sort of collapse and I'm sitting here waiting for the doctor to ring instead of snuggling down under my duvet. It'll be in the next two hours, they tell me. Well, it's 10pm now... who wants to go to bed before midnight anyway?
I was supposed to be preaching on Sunday morning but have today rung my mentor and asked if she can do the service in my place. I haven't given a thought to the planning yet. It's a dilemma. It's only fair, if I am not going to be able to do it, that I give my replacement as much warning as possible rather than dropping it on her at the last minute. And yet I feel wrong somehow. When I started this Local Preacher training, I was well aware of God telling me to trust him to find the time for me to do it properly. So by handing it over to another it feels as though I am failing to trust. Maybe if I had held on to it, then it would have come together by Sunday. Or is it that God is maintaining his part of the bargain by providing me with someone who I can ask without reservation to help me out at a difficult time. Hard to tell... but at the moment I feel as though falling back on my friends and on God is the only option and letting myself be carried through the tough time so that I can give back when things are easier.
Praise God for a good friend who sent me a text just as I was feeling at my lowest ebb and offered to come round (I was sadly too tired) and to loan me the money and to give me a shoulder to offload onto. That offer was worth more than a million pounds to me.