snowy sunday

After a week of waiting, my snow arrived overnight. I shuffled in to make coffee at 7:00 a.m. and was disoriented, momentarily, by the brilliant glow in the kitchen. I stood at the sliding glass window for a minute and absorbed the gorgeous view. Then I started thinking about church and how I'd get there with four inches of fluff on the ground.

Dave had already left for the church office. He's usually there by 5:30 Sunday mornings to look over his notes and pray. I called him.

"What do you think?"

"I think it's great," he said.

"Yes, but do you think we'll make it up the hill?" We live deep in the woods. To get to our house, you must first traverse a steep gravel road, then turn and cross a recreational trail, then cross a narrow strip of road which runs over a fair-sized stream, then up an incline. The first hill is so steep that occasionally, first-time invitees have stopped at the top, turned around, and headed home rather than venture down for dinner.

Dave re-instructed me on how to put the jeep in 4-wheel drive. I'll be the first to admit that I have a leak in the area of my brain intended to store mechanical information. I can remember spark plug/carburator/4-wheel drive-type information just long enough to perform one single, immediate act--but then all the knowledge drains away. It's a perpetual, unpluggable leak. I've learned to live with it, and ask lots of questions.

We tried. And we might have made it, except for the fact that a jogger just happened to be running down the trail right when I most needed to maintain my momentum. We stopped for him, and that stopped us altogether. That, I could have lived with. It was the subsequent sliding that did me in. Maybe I'm the only one who panics when sliding backwards in a car and heading straight toward a 20-foot gulley. To hear my son, you'd think I reacted unreasonably.

"Mom!" he yelled, interrupting my OhGodhelppleasehelppleasehelppleasehelp. "You need to stop panicking."

He doesn't even have his license yet. But I'll remember his words the first time he's out driving in the snow, and we'll just see who's praying then. (All right . . . it will likely be me.)

I called Dave again and tried to make him fix it from five miles away. That never works very well.

"Do you have it in 4-wheel drive?" he asked.

"Yes. You told me to do that and I did that."

"Do you have it in 1st?"

"Yes. You told me to do that and I did that too."

The jeep started sliding again. OhGodhelppleasehelppleasehelp.

"You need to stop panicking," Dave said.

"I can't talk to you and steer into the ditch at the same time!" I yelled, handing the phone out the window to Zac, who had decided he felt safer outside the car.

"Dad, Mom's panicking," he said.

"I am not! I am not! I am not panicking--stop saying I'm panicking!"

The story is longer than I care to tell. In the end, Dave went on to church, and the kids and I walked back to the house. The jeep sits right where I left it.

Once my pulse stabilized and my heart returned to my chest and I remembered to breath, I decided we'd hold our own church service. Tera and I sang along to a Brett Williams worship CD; Zac read the words from the CD insert. Then I asked if there were any announcements. Oddly, there weren't. We read together from the Bible, discussed what it means to hunger after God, and prayed. Then the kids went outside and I started knitting a new scarf, which I set aside only long enough to write this entry.

Dave is home now and just discovered that something's wrong with the 4-wheel drive. That means it wasn't me--not a single part of it. Vindication always lifts my mood. What a wonderful day. And it's about to get even better. Our friends, the Kelly's, have invited us to dinner. They're even coming to get us--of course, they'll wait at the top of the hill.

Off to find my boots.