Oj And Me

Oj and Me

Making my way to a departing flight, I stopped at the newsstand to pick up a paper and something to drink. Normally I would have grabbed a coffee, but I’d already had two cups, so I chose orange juice instead. I bought a USA Today and a plastic bottle of Florida sunshine with a twist-off lid. Before boarding, I took a sip or two, twisted the top back on, and dropped the bottle in the bottom of my bag.

A few minutes later I found my seat and, with my carry-on sitting in my lap, recognized the distinct smell of oranges. I tipped the bag to peer inside and saw twenty ounces of juice sloshing and swishing over my cell phone, pocketbook, hairbrush, sunglasses, and several pages of lecture notes. The bottle cap was bobbing in the lake of vitamin C, and the flight attendants were preparing for takeoff.

I caught one attendant’s eye and tried to explain my dilemma quietly enough so that my seatmate would not hear. The attendant granted my plea and allowed me to dash to the lavatory to empty the sticky contents of my bag, turning it upside down over the toilet. The flight had not yet taken off, and I was already a mess. A gaggle of four-year-olds at a Chuck E. Cheese’s birthday party could not have been as disordered as I was, and it was barely nine in the morning.

I have an imaginary vision of myself as someone whose clothes never wrinkle, whose hair is never out of place, who is always on time and who is never frustrated by life’s unexpected zingers. But that is not the woman I am in real life. In real life I am the woman who runs late, whose keys are often missing, whose day frequently (and quickly) degenerates into chaos, and whose bag is full of orange juice.

But I am also the woman with at least a million reasons to rejoice anyway.

I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me.

Philippians 3:12