Christmas List Update

Last weekend, I lost my list at the mall.

Once I lost the master list for Jonathan's graduation party.  I was beside myself.  Shawn was working at home, and he was on an important call.  I wrote him a note in my most tragic handwriting, tears streaming down my face, "I lost my list."  Since he was busy, I went away to fold laundry.  There was always laundry, back then.  Shawn finished his call and came to find me.  "Would that be the list that you told me it would be the end of the world if you lost it?" he asked.  I nodded.   He continued, "The one I scanned for you so we would have a copy if this happened?"  I had totally forgotten about that.  He produced a computer printout of the list and I went merrily along with party planning.  Weeks after the party, I found the original list plastered into the bottom of a defunct Aldi box in a corner of the garage.

The list I lost at the mall was not a master list, and, in fact, some items on the list had become irrelevant due to my husband encouraging me to hire someone to do some things I'd been intending to try to do myself.  Still, losing a list leaves an empty feeling in my hands and at my side and in the corners of my brain where I wonder what thoughts will never be retrieved.  For the rest of the time we were at the mall, after I realized the list was gone, I found myself looking at my hands and rubbing the tips of my fingers down the insides of my thumbs.

Today I completed all of the items on my List for Today which was scrawled on an ancient pharmacy receipt that had been stapled to a prescription, and which I had retrieved from the bowels of the pantry because we were trying to figure out some health insurance things before we quit in search of a better attitude.

It's going to be okay.  As long as God grants us peace and good weather and health, it will all be wonderful.  I can't really say what God will do, because He is God, and His ways are not my ways.  But He is kind and compassionate and faithful, so I can always hope that my next lesson will be an opportunity to learn through seeing His mighty hand work on my behalf, rather than an opportunity to learn through adversity, which is always more difficult to be thankful for, at least in the middle of it.

Time to start tomorrow's list.  (Writing it.  Not doing it.  Not yet.)