Monday of the Seventh Week

The flight from South Bend to Chicago is routine now, although it’s been about a month since I’ve gone this way. The view gets my attention and I look up for a few moments from my reading and gaze out the nearest window at the faint glow above Lake Michigan and the placid still blueness of the vast body of water below. Today I’m crossing at about six eastern, five central, and daylight hints as we race the sunrise westward. I’m sleepy and had only a few sips of coffee on the quiet drive to the airport with my wife, few words spoken and probably okay considering the mental state I’m in, or lack thereof. It’s a 23 minute flight from takeoff to landing, but seems like the longest 23 minutes ever, and I need caffeine or sleep or a the promise of a day with few demands so I’ll be ready for the rat race once all the folks from California arrive in Texas this week.

The United flight to dfw is quiet and unmemorable, except that I do finish When I don’t desire God by John Piper, my nineteenth Piper book, and a very good one it turns out even though it had been at the bottom of my list.

I arrive at work and on the elevator two ladies are coming inside from their smoke break and one complains how hard it was to get out of bed and come to work today, and I just think how she has no idea what I did to get here, but whatever.

I walk through my office door at 10:31 am, not bad considering the rigmarole of getting to work, and find e-mails already to the effect that something is going wrong with a particular project that was to run smoothly over the weekend, and it turns out that it isn’t as bad as I think, but still it consumes my first few minutes. At the same time, Melissa calls and says she went to the dentist for an emergency root canal, no kidding, and could things get any worse for my wife? I want badly to be there, and it seems everything is caving in for a moment, and what happened to the tranquility of being with friends and family last night and all that was good with the world for a while? She is going to take vicotin and Landen will take care for things for a while. Meantime I’ll check on whether our new health insurance covers an emergency root canal since dental insurance doesn’t kick in until September 1.

It sounds like I am going to have to figure out where I want to be sooner that I thought, meaning not in Fort Worth, so I'll need to either choose a job in Indiana or go back home to California. It’s shaping up to be an interesting day after all.

Just as I’m getting consumed in the flurry, I receive an e-mail from Bryan, the director of All Pro Dad, and he asks if he can re-print my adoption article in September: the one from a couple years ago before we brought Maddie home, and I reply that I’ll need to update it since she’s been home with us for a year an a half, and it reminds me how important that topic is in my life.

By the way, my niece Hannah came to me while I was eating dinner at the grown-up table with everybody last night, and she moved in close to me and asked how long I’m going to work in Texas, and why don’t I just move there, and when I tell her it’s just for a while, she asks, “Why don’t you just be a pastor with my dad?” and I smile and pull her close and hug her without saying a word.