Car Day

Yesterday was a Car Day. For the uninitiated, that was a day spent primarily in getting myself and at least two kids in and out of the car and driving all over Perth - mostly back and forth, but sometimes in circles. FYI, here's my list of pit stops:

8:30am Drop Josh, Anna and Lisa to school.
9:00am Meet Jeff, Abi and Sam at a friend's house for morning tea with them.
10:00am Doctor appointment to get my stitches out and an asthma script for the trip. (Abi and Sam with me.)
Then home to pick up the things Josh and Lisa forgot to pack for school.
11:15am Drop off items to Josh and Lisa's teachers, Pick up Anna from school.
11:45am Anna's dentist appointment. She needed two fillings. I am a bad mother.
Then Drop Anna back to school (she preferred going back to school over lying on the couch for the afternoon watching a DVD of her choice. I gave her the option. She said she'd cry if she couldn't go back to school. Amazing child!) When Anna asks for a drink of water in the car, I lean over to reach Sam's drink bottle and my shirt rips all down the back. The shirt that I spent half an hour sewing buttons onto two evenings ago. Drat. But I know what is next in the car day after I drop Anna off at school, so I chuckle and pray briefly, Father God, thank you so much for afternoon naps for toddlers. I love them. Especially when they force a break in the middle of a Car Day.
Then stop at the shops to buy some fruit for Abi and Sam's lunch since we have run out.
PAUSE in Car Day. Home for lunch, to change my shirt, for Sam's nap, for Abi's homeschooling lessons, and for my Bible study time. My BSF discussion learer rings me while I am in the middle of my Bible study, and I have a laugh with her over the shirt ripping incident.
4:30pm Collect Josh, Anna and Lisa from after school Italian lessons.
4:45pm Drop Josh, Anna and Lisa home.
5:02pm Miss the Medicare office being open for my refund by 2 minutes. Drat.
Then while still at the shopping centre, swap a faulty purchase at the Target front desk, and briefly peruse shoe shops, looking for something without heels to wear in the US. Nada. Drat.
5:45pm Home for the evening. Kids are having a water gun fight in the front yard with Jeff. Relax.

It is days like this that remind me so thoroughly that everything I do - what little it is - I do in the power and strength of Christ. Psalm 42:11 puts my feelings this day very clearly:

11 Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.

The same verse is also in Psalm 42:5 and 43:11, so the Psalmist must have needed to remind himself of this a lot, just like me.

Yesterday, that time I spent reading my Bible at the dinner table while Sam napped and Abi quietly played in another room was like a balm to my soul. It also brought some laughter. One of the questions from my BSF study notes for John 4:1-30 read, "Jesus uses symbolism in verse 13 when He speaks of this water (the water of the earth). Give examples of things for which people thirst that, while not bad in themselves, cannot satisfy their desires."

I started answering this with some specifics:
money;
chocolate;
caffeine, fat, sugar;
sexual passion or the adoring emotional attachment of another person;
having a clean and tidy house;
quiet;
having perfectly well-behaved children;
knowledge;
rhetorical skill;
having read many of the "Great Books"...
The last thing on my list was "having all the buttons sewn on your shirt". You can see where the laughter came in.

But the truth is, none of these things can satisfy. Even a Car Day that goes rather smoothly by all accounts is no substitute for the new life that is only found through a relationship God in the Person of Jesus Christ.

Do you have that relationship with God in Jesus?