Sometimes

Sometimes things go your way, and sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes the company hires you, and sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes it rains on a day when you needed sunshine.

Sometimes the cheese on the pizza burns.

I’m really frustrated with the continued hitting of brick walls in our life lately. I feel as though I’ve looked up and suddenly here it is, eight years later. We’ve struggled through so much with startup companies, rundown companies and broken promises that I wonder if life ever gets any easier. Ever.

People often mock my faith as a childish relic or unnecessary fantasisation. Magical thinking which solves nothing. I promise you now, though, that were it not for that magical thinking I would be dead three times over. Because this garbage is just too hard otherwise.

I often feel lately as though nothing goes my way. That’s why the above picture means so much. It’s a photo of my restless dog peeking up at the front seat on our way home from Christmas vacation. That picture was taken on December 27th, 2006. This is the dog for whom we received a probable death sentence on August 18th, 2006. The vet talked to us about possible choices for ‘making him comfortable’ and ‘easing his pain’. Because the x-rays looked like cancer. And the leg swelled like cancer. And bone cancer is a leading cause of death in that breed.

Yet here he is in that picture, four months past the likely date of his death from the cancer that wasn’t. I swear to you I grieved that dog for weeks. Had he been stricken with cancer he would have most likely been dead by mid-October. I pictured getting through Halloween without him barking at trick-or-treaters. I pictured the long car trip to and from Indiana without him clambering over the presents in the back of the car. I listened to songs like ‘Boulder to Birmingham with tears streaming down my face as I got used to the idea of our inevitable separation.

But there he is, in that picture in the back of the car. Alive and well and bored to tears as we gas up the car in Elizabethtown. And today he ran around my backyard in fits of springtime joy, bouncing all over the grass.

So I guess sometimes things go your way. And sometimes God is kind.