Derailed

Blessings don’t always look like blessings at first. About two and half weeks after my son got his first car to go to his first career job, it broke down. Not just a little breakdown, a catastrophic, “This car is dead to you” type breakdown. I began driving him to and from work every day.

It was a lot. 

The commute for me took two and three quarters of an hour on a good day and three and a half on a bad one. It ended up derailing my progress – or perhaps revealing that I wasn’t as well as I thought. It prompted me to take some drastic improvement measures that I might not have taken if I had not had to do that amount of driving. You can read about that here if you want to, but that’s not what I’ve been thinking bout all day. It’s actually been the conversations we’ve been able to have on our drives that have given me the inspiration for this post.

My God Is An On Time God

Not all of the conversations I’ve had with my son have been great. Some are mundane, others are tense, and some devolve into lectures. I’ve learned a great deal listening to him and have also had the opportunity to impart information and wisdom to a captive audience. In all, it’s been a blessing. My girls will sit and talk to me for ages. Still, while we chatted and hung out a bit before the drives, we hadn’t really had consistent conversations for long periods daily. It’s a good hour and a half of conversation every day, and it’s been nice.

God Is Good All The Time  

This morning as I drove him to work, I picked up where we had left off on our conversation from the day before. My son had gotten excellent news the day prior, which demonstrated that his hard work had paid off in an important area of his life. I told him how proud his dad and I were of him. He couldn’t get over his good luck. I reminded him that he was not lucky at all – he was blessed. I reminded him of some of the difficulties he had encountered along his journey and how he didn’t give up faith. He used his disappointments and set-backs to fuel his drive to work harder, and, as a result, he was blessed. 

All The Time God Is Good

He clearly understood what I was saying, but I wanted to drive the point home a little more as any good mother will do. (Mom used to call that flogging a dead horse, but I like to think of it as providing ample real-world examples.) I began to tell him about several instances in which God made a way where there seemed to be no way. Example after example of times when we were at our last in one way or another and how God had provided a way for us gushed out in my eagerness to show him what I meant. Some of the examples he knew, some he had forgotten. Still, when I began laying them out before him one after the other, he saw the lifeline God had been in our lives more clearly. 

Blessings and Gratitude

We prayed and thanked God for all He had done in our lives and how He had blessed my son. The experience filled me with tremendous joy and excitement. I know it did for him too. In fact, he looked happier getting out of the car than he had for ages.

The conversation also gave me hope.

I was abruptly reminded that we had coded blessings into the choosing of his name. In fact, we had chosen each of our children’s names for their meanings. My son’s was related to being blessed. My daughter’s and their names were also on my mind as I made my way back home. All I could think about was how grateful I was for God, His provisions, His promises. I was thankful that my children’s names all came back to God’s blessings for them – even when life seemed impossible. 

But he said, “What is impossible with men is possible with God.” Luke 18:27