One Bad Week - Tales from TN Part 3

NOTE: If you have not already read "Welcome to TN - Tales from TN Part 1" and "Life Happens All at Once - Tales from TN Part 2", then this post will not make much sense.

Being locked out of my car and apartment on Tuesday night was not how I had planned to spend my evening. It was really an eerie feeling to be locked out from where it was safe and to have no one that I knew to turn to for help. But I was determined to learn from it and move on. Once I got inside I called my mom and told her all about it. We even laughed about it, because it was over. One bad day does not make a bad week.

Wednesday

The next day I was driving to the church I had been visiting. There were a couple of different ways to get there and I was still trying to figure out which one was faster. I noticed a police car behind me so I naturally checked my speed. I was fine. He stayed behind me for about 2 more miles and exited when I exited. By then I was kind of wondering if he was following me. I knew for a fact that I had NOT been speeding so I was hoping he just happened to be headed the same direction. 

Wrong. I saw the lights start to flash. Since no one else was around I knew he wanted me to pull over even though I was clueless as to why. I pulled over but I was getting upset. I couldn't imagine why he was pulling me over! I had never been pulled over before and I knew I wasn't speeding and I didn't want to be late for church!

He stood behind my car for the longest five minutes of my life. And when he walked up and I rolled my window down he told me that I was free to go. He had been looking at my temporary tags and initially thought that they were expired. I guess in OK (where I bought the car) they wrote the tags with the purchase date and they were good for 30 days from that point. In TN, the practice was to write the date that the tags expire. So he thought they were out-of-date when really they were just out-of-state.

When he left and I was finishing my drive to church I was able to laugh, a strange relieved kind of laugh, but laughter none the less. It was upsetting but it was over and I enjoyed telling the church people about it that night.

Still two odd things in two days... I hoped that I was done with craziness for a while. But it was only Wednesday. The week was only half way through.

Thursday

Thursday morning I headed down the stairs to go to work. I turn the key and grrrrr...grrrrrr. Uh oh! My brand-new car won't start! Since my headlights don't turn off automatically, I thought that I must have left the headlights on all night and drained the battery down. I was pretty irritated with myself. But thankfully I had been planning on leaving early so I still had time to call a coworker and get a ride to work.

After work some guy coworkers who knew more about cars that I did came over to look at it. I was hoping it was just the battery had drained down. They were able to help me get it jumped and I drove it around for a while to try to give it time to recharge the battery some.

Although this problem was probably the least stressful and also easily fixed, it was especially annoying since I thought it was my entirely my own stupid fault. (This wasn't the last time the battery would die, but it was the first. Turned out that the battery was defective and I ended up getting it replaced a few weeks later.)

Friday

Nothing unusual happened that Friday. It was nice. After all of the crazy, frustrating, scary, and stressful things that had happened the last three days it was nice to get back to normal.

Saturday

I was off from LensCrafters so I decided to spend the morning relaxing and then make a grocery run. I even decided to try out a new grocery store rather than driving to the closest "nice" Wal-Mart. Everything was going well. Prices were great. I liked the store. I even got a phone call from my sister and was enjoying taking my time shopping and catching up with her.

Eventually I paid for everything and headed out to my car. As I was walking up, I thought that something looked funny about my car. "Why does it look different?" I suddenly realized it was because my temporary tags were missing! They were just gone! Stolen! After the week I had, this was the last straw! (When a co-worker's tags were stolen the same day my temp tag expired a week later, we figured that it was stolen in the parking lot at work, on the Friday that I thought nothing bad had happened.)

I was furious! And scared. I drove home very carefully praying the whole time that I wouldn't get pulled over a second time in one week. I remember clenching my teeth and straining to hold back the tears that threatened to blind me while I was driving. I brokenly told the Lord that I felt that I had reached my limit for one week and begged Him to show me mercy by not letting me be pulled over. 

I made it home undisturbed. My peaceful, relaxed Saturday was spent with me filing a police report and trying to get the dealership in OKC to overnight me new temp tags (which never came). Thankfully I had already planned on taking it to get it registered Monday morning. So I only had Sunday that I couldn't legally drive it.

My God was and is ever gracious. He knew my limits better than I did and had no plans to allow me to face more than I could handle. He was trying to grow me (not crush me) and wanted teach me to rely on His strength. Through it all He was teaching me to turn to Him first, to make prayer my immediate response to a trial.

Sometimes He has to strip away all outside help to force us to look to Him for help. Sometimes He has to pile on frustration after frustration to wear out our own strength so that we realize we need His. Sometimes He has to let things become scary so that we realize He is our protection.

I learned a lot during that week. Most of it is pretty funny to me now. But because of the things I learned and the ways it grew me, I wouldn't change a thing.