Dusk was falling as I drove up our street with my three children in the back of our white minivan. My mind spun over the details of my day–a day I had anticipated and planned for some time… Had it gone well? I wondered. Exhaustion numbed my emotions, and I couldn’t quite say.
I eased the van to the far right side of the street as I approached our house, and distractedly watched a woman with a clipboard coming down our neighbor’s porch steps. What was she doing? I wondered. Perhaps she was one of the sales-people that frequently canvas our street?Suddenly my distracted and scampering thoughts were pulled up short by a grinding lurch as I struck the curb. The clip-board lady turned around, and turned back, and turned around again, eyeing me doubtfully, as another lady with a clipboard came down our own porch steps and joined her.
I backed up a bit and put the vehicle in park, denial seeping through my senses. My husband dashed down the steps behind the woman with the clipboard and walked over to the van, motioning me to unlock it so he could open the passenger door. I read, on his face, a mixture of chagrin, amusement, and, yes, forgiveness. And before his words confirmed, I knew a sinking, deflated feeling.
“Our expectations,” a wise woman had shared that day, “should be rooted in the goodness of God.”
And surely God is good, and so is my husband, because my expectations knew without even asking that my husband would unhesitatingly work to get my minivan fixed and cover the expenses of another tire, just two weeks after replacing both front tires, and do it all kindly… even though I have run into that particular nasty corner of our curb so many times since we are married, that I can’t even remember exactly how many tires I have blown…
