Small Inconveniences

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.

“I can’t find my wallet.”

My husband was rummaging through the corner of the kitchen, frustration evident in his tone. He had been on his way out the door to retrieve our oldest daughter from youth group, and the pickup time was looming.

Sighing a little, I started looking around the house. It wasn’t in the car, the mudroom, the kitchen, a coat pocket, or his jeans from yesterday. So where could it possibly be?

Suddenly, a thought occurred to him. Earlier in the day, while he was driving the girls to school, they had heard a sudden noise. At the time, he realized he’d forgotten to grab his coffee mug from the roof of the car, and it had fallen off. Now, he started to wonder if he’d lost his wallet the same way.

The problem was that this drive had been twelve hours earlier, and several inches of snow had fallen in the meantime. Snowplows had rumbled down the streets, and it was now nighttime. The likelihood of finding his wallet in the enormous snowbanks seemed slim. But he got into his car and started down the road to search for it. Merely two houses down, the brown dot of his leather wallet stood out in the middle of the big white snowbank.

What had felt like an inconvenience earlier in the day—forgotten coffee that had fallen off the roof with a crash—turned out to be a blessing in disguise. If he had placed only his wallet on the rooftop, the thought that he’d lost it outdoors wouldn’t have occurred to him. Together, we marveled that he had been able to spot it so quickly.

It can be easy to get flustered by life. There are days when even minor inconveniences—a leaky faucet, a schedule change, a cranky coworker—seem like major problems. When things don’t go our way, it’s tempting to focus on and magnify the problem. Yet our mindset matters. Peace is possible when we know God and trust him to care for us. When we look for the good in the challenges we face, we can see how they play out in the larger story of our lives—even when we accidentally dump a wallet in the snowbank.

Kristin

Today’s Act of Gratitude

Thank God for a time in your life when a minor inconvenience diminished the impact of a more significant challenge.