Wrangler Dani

This morning, when I got in the shower, I didn’t exactly have house-cleaning on my mind. We’d just gotten back from a long working weekend, and I was thinking about the items on my to-do list, the writing and editing and emailing that makes up my days. So, I was a little surprised when a dot of greenish-gray on the shower curtain caught my eye and made my internal frenzy stall to a background hum.

It was mildew, the small speck of growth that happens every now and then in wet places. So it should not have been a shock to me to see it on my $4 shower curtain – but all I wanted to do was stamp my foot in frustration.

This speck of mildew made me unreasonably frustrated because we weren’t supposed to encounter this here. We bought this $4 shower curtain with the intention of blithely throwing it away in a couple of months, as we moved on the Dream House and the New Life. We weren’t supposed to be buying new shower curtains or replacing light bulbs or cleaning carpets here, this apartment was intended to be a very temporary way-station, not a permanent dwelling-place.

Yet here we are, coming up on the one-year anniversary of our move to the Northwest, still in the supposedly temporary month-to-month apartment, in escrow for the third time on yet another house with more hang-ups, snafus and complications. So far, in Oregon, we have bought three tubs of dishwashing detergent, two boxes of Bounce and soon apparently, we’ll need a new shower curtain. The needs of a comfortable home continue, but my comfort in this home is receding as I gnaw my lip in frustration and worry about the “what-ifs” – what if we can’t find a house, what if this means no family and no children, what if we aren’t meant to be in Oregon, what if God isn’t listening – what if, what if.

What if, of course, is the opposite of Come Lord Jesus. So I restrain my manic thoughts, push down my fears and I start to pray. I’m asking for answers, for peace, and I’m even daring to ask that our dreams be realized – that the home and family we moved for become a reality.

Will you pray with me? I know that I haven’t written much lately so I’m probably lucky if I have any readership left at all, but if you’re there, will you pray? Maybe this morning’s mildew was meant to do just this – to drive me to Jesus when I have long-since run out of my own ideas.

May the ordinary things – the mildew on the shower curtain, the disappointment of everyday struggles, the difficulty that I so want to push aside and breeze through – serve to always, ever push me to Jesus.