The Last Can of Soup

After two hours of sleep last night, courtesy of a very late-night novel edit that ran until 3:36 a.m., followed by my dogs waking me up at 5:30 to go out and then squeezing under the fence to go on a wild fox chase and running God-knew-where all over Clark County for an hour before I spotted them and rounded them up, I crawled my tired self to church this morning. My heart and mind were not in it; in fact, there is not enough caffeine in all of the universe for my mind to be in much of anything today. However, I love our little church and the people there, and if ever I needed to be there, it was this morning. We missed the Sunday school service due to the runaway dogs and a fatigue-inspired slow start, but we made it to the church service, then enjoyed the Fifth Sunday Bring-Your-Own-Lunch-and-a-Dessert-to-Share (we're Baptists...eating together and devouring desserts in large quantities is a requirement. I'm sure Paul just forgot to mention that in one of his -sians books). Fueled by my morning cuppajo, a giant brick of homemade German chocolate cake, and a yummy scoop of my friend Sue's barbecue beef, we went to the second service. As it turned out, those cookies, cake, and brownies were not the sweetest part of my day.

 

I am one of those people who worries. If you have not noticed this, you obviously do not  know me personally and/or have never, ever read my Facebook stati or my blogs. In fact, if you are not aware that I am constantly worried, terrified, anxious, and always chicken-littling about one thing or another, you must have wandered to this blog by some sort of odd cyber accident. Everyone who has ever collided with me for more than forty seconds, either online or IRL (that's "in real life" for those of you born prior to 1970-ish) knows that I live my life in a constant analogy of pianos precariously hanging by a string above my head or figurative frenzies of sharks waiting beneath to make Crunch N' Munch out of my legs while I'm just trying to stay above water. In other words, I worry...a lot...about a lot. Today, my worries are really the same old, same old: the trifecta of terror known as rent-bills-work. This testy trio haunts me all the time, just as it haunts other people. It is part of the human condition, so I realize this is not unique. Thus, please do not construe it as a complaint or whining or a venture into victimhood when I say I am very scared about tomorrow's rent, Tuesday's car insurance, Monday's project deadlines, and whatever other sharks and pianos decide to show up in my life this week. To put it bluntly, I am scared. No...terrified. No...petrified. No...horrified. Or maybe...mortified. Long story short, I'm some kind of -fied about this upcoming week, and certainly not the satis- variety.

In that second service today, I was running on proverbial fumes. Physically, after two hours of sleep, my energy was about enough to give me a pulse and nothing more. Mentally, I was so consumed by deadlines for debts and projects - for money and work due as soon as tomorrow, when I simply don't have it and cannot achieve it on my own - that I had trouble even bellowing out my off-key versions of the old hymns I usually remember every word to. I put on a happy face as we ate and sang and shook hands, but deep down, I was struggling with worry greater than usual. Thank Godness (and that's not a typo) that our wonderful pastor had the wherewithal to say the perfect things, as if he somehow knew pianos are dangling over my head and hungry Bruces are circling my ankles.

The story in Mark of Jesus feeding the 4,000 is a great one, one of those stories my mom used to love to regale us with, whipping out her flannel-graph and amazing us with imaginings of a few little fish turning into a smorgasboard for a hungry mob; as a girl, I often thought of it as Jesus turning a can of tuna and some crackers into McDonald's fish filets for all, but as an adult, I'm thinking they didn't have tartar sauce and American cheese back then. It's a story about so many things, but for me today, it was a reminder of provision. He would not let them go away hungry. He asked what they had, saw their need/lack, and filled in the gaps to make sure they had exactly what they needed exactly when they needed it most. As our wonderful Pastor Cochran wisely said today, "Sometimes, God lets you get down to opening that last can of soup, and the next thing He does will be all the more glorious because of it." Oh, how true and poignant it is! When it comes to certain things, like the rent and my energy and my tolerance for dealing with things ATM (that's "at the moment" for anyone born prior to 1970-ish, and it has nothing to do with a cash machine), I am on my last can of soup. That story and those words were the exact thing I needed to hear at exactly the moment I needed to hear it, and even though all my problems for tomorrow and coming days are not clearly solved yet, I can rest my head, mind, heart, and fearfully crying eyes tonight knowing that God is quite aware of what I have, what I need, and when I need it. Even my unsaved friends remind me of this, and of course my Christian ones do, so perhaps 44 years after I took my first breath, I can finally start listening to this great advice and stop chicken-littling so much.