Thankful

I know it's nowhere near Thanksgiving.
I'm not sure it's "permissible" to link to a hallmark ecard, but this is one of my favorites of all time.

Check out what Sir Thomas the Turkey is thankful for.
My favorite: "He is like a angel."
Ha ha ha.

I got a message from a friend the other day. She was updating on what has been going on in her life and at the end she wrote, "He's so wonderful."
God, that is. He's the wonderful one. Her sincerity made me smile.

And it also reminded me of the turkey's comments.
How the farmer is like God: good to the turkey who does not deserve it.
But what the turkey doesn't know is that the farmer has ulterior motives.
In that way, the farmer is not like God. God is good to us because he is good to us. Not because he wants to plumpen us up and eat us.

Anyhow, I liked the way she nonchalantly threw it out there, "He's so wonderful," as if she was talking about a friend. Someone she knew. Like she might also say of some friend she met, "He's so cool."
It was genuine.
And true, unlike the turkey's ascertainment of the farmer.
A very happy reminder in an often cold and dark world.

Serendipitious orchestration

I just lived through a day orchestrated to bring us to Mexican food--good Mexican food.
Our plan today, my friend and I, was to go to a certain market where there was supposed to be a nice bookstore and a really good (dare-we-hope: authentic) Mexican restaurant. Good Mexican food is a rarity on this side of the world.
We found the bookstore. It was as expected. Not fantastic, but had books.
Now it was time to eat.
We found all the signage for the restaurant we wanted to go to, but where was the entrance?
"Oh that place is finished," said the guard we asked.
"Finished?"
"Finished."
Sad, sad news. No Mexican for lunch.
We found a coffee shop to eat at before we melted and returned to my house.

Meanwhile, my friend's husband was supposed to be leaving on a plane. But the plane's airconditioning was broken and they were sitting out on the tarmac in 104 degrees unable to leave. Several hours later they deplaned all the passengers and moved them to a 5 star hotel in the north of the city.
A 5 star hotel? Hmm. This might be our only opportunity to go see what it's like inside...
Our "only choice", then, was to head there as soon as nap time for her one year old was over.

Riding in autos is hard, tiring work. But that's what we ended up in.
The call to the taxi to take us to the fancy hotel was at 4:20pm. The dispatcher said: "There is no taxi available for half an hour. 5 o'clock it will come for you."
That was very bad math and not half an hour. But I agreed.
At 5:15 I called the driver and went through extensive directions on how to get to my house. Twenty minutes later I called and asked the driver where he was. The name of the location he gave me was about half an hour away.
What!
Okay, cancel that taxi service.

Now what do we do? It would be fun to go see the 5 star hotel that we wouldn't normally have opportunity to go see. But it was getting late. We would have to have time to come back for the kid's bedtime.
Our new plan? Walk out of the neighborhood and find our own taxi. If we can't get one, we walk a little further and end up at the Chinese restaurant nearby.
As we walked along, an auto passed us asking where we wanted to go? An auto wasn't in the plan. Because it was hot and we were tired and we didn't want to over-tire the kid before we'd even gotten anywhere. But there was the auto...
With a reasonable price.
We looked at each other.
We took it.
So we didn't exactly arrive at the five star hotel looking as if we belonged there, but they let us in anyway.
We walked through the lobby (unimpressive) and put our feet in the pool (slightly impressive). Then we headed out again to find dinner.
We thought we would go to a nearby pizza place and we got an auto to go there. I told him which block to take us to and when he pulled up, what did I see? A sign for Sancho's, the Mexican restaurant we'd been trying to find at lunch time.
"There's Sancho's," I said.
My friend misheard me to say, "There's a sandpit." Which was also true. Because all in front of the restaurant was construction and sand and a great big hole--no way for us to walk through.
The driver, though, showed us the path where people were walking through the construction site.
So my friend and I stood outside the Mexican restaurant and had this short conversation:
"We came here for pizza, but there's Sancho's. Which one do you want to go to?"
"Well, we know what pizza tastes like, we haven't tried Sancho's."
"Right. Let's go."
When we stepped inside and were told they had a baby chair, we knew we had arrived. A marvelous baby chair. Even though I had to eat with one hand while I held my fingers on the latch to keep the tray down and the kid from escaping.
That, and the excellent food with real cheese and real sour cream made all we had been through throughout the day totally worth it to end up here.
Disappointment at lunch time.
Waiting and waiting for a taxi that never showed up.
A plane with air conditioning that didn't work.
A visit to a 5 star hotel.
A search for pizza because we hadn't been successful at lunch.
It had all brought us here.
"That's what you call 'serendipity'," I said.
"No," replied my friend, "That's what you call the orchestration of a good God who knew exactly what we needed."
Absolutely.

Ugliness

There are a lot of things I notice.
And most of those I choose to post here are the observations that have some sort of human interest. They are fun or intriguing, wild or unimaginable.
But the things I've noticed this week are ugly.
Sin is never pretty.
In contrast to the waves of disappointment, anger and sadness of the past few days, are the readings I have been going through about trust and forgiveness.
Two things stand out to me, as I hope to grow into the person I desire to be:
One, if I have a problem forgiving, it's because I don't know how much I've been forgiven.
And two, I cannot keep myself safe, but I can trust God to hold me when others fail me.
Because at the center of everything is Him and his love.