Murphy's week

I’ve been having one of those weeks. I wish I could rewind and start again. The first thing was that in shifting a small cupboard in the lounge room (I only wanted to move it an inch or two) I knocked over one of my favourite things which is a sort of plaque after the fashion of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” and it fell against the cement rendered wall and chipped the corner off (I hate concrete walls – they scratch, chip and break everything!). Then I went to pick someone up for a wedding, on that shockingly hot day, and there was no parking out the front of their place so I pulled into a parking lot under a block of flats opposite, and then when I went to back out of it, right in my blind spot was a kind of cement pylon I hadn’t noticed so I dinged the back bumper bar. Then I got involved in a blog comment discussion I wish I had never entered into (this was perhaps the worst, cause it was more deliberate on my part and had more potential to be ungodly – and I learnt my lesson about how things can wind up and that if the other party doesn’t budge you just want to further argue a case you didn’t care that much about in the first place, and you can say and/or share things you later regret), then I went to IKEA on Saturday, a rainy Saturday, which I knew was going to be crazy but I didn’t have any other opportunity to go. I must have been day-dreaming because I missed the Homebush Bay Drive exit, so then I got off at Silverwater Road and thought I’d just come back along Parramatta Road, but you can’t turn left onto Homebush Bay Drive off Parramatta Road, so I had to come right back in, in the wet Saturday traffic, and start the M4 again, then, once I finally got to IKEA, I picked up some crimson cushions which I thought were the colour I was after for the new couches, but turns out they’re not, so now I need to go back there, which wasn’t going to happen any time soon, and there were no trolley’s available on that weird thing that delivers trolleys so I went to get my self-help furniture without a trolley and found myself with a box two metres long full of wooden furniture to lug about (even the nice guy at the checkout couldn’t find me a trolley), which I had to jam into my car etc. Then after IKEA I went to Broadway, also on a wet Saturday, to get some things for the house (I am having a small interior decorating fetish at present) and that was quite exasperating, most especially Coles. Then I thought I would light this stubb of a candle left in my standing candelabra that I got for my 21st to get rid of it so I could put new candles in (since I was getting all house-decoratey), and I got distracted by a visiting friend and instead of the candle going out when it got to the bottom the wax kept burning and actually burnt the candelabra, would you believe, then my friend, trying to be helpful, vigorously blew it out and wax sprayed everywhere and landed on the carpet (I think some had already dripped on the carpet), so later, in removing the wax (with an iron and paper towel – but don’t try that at home because if your carpet contains nylon you might just melt the carpet) I burnt myself with the iron – and I have done that a thousand times before but this time it blistered. I hate little mishaps like those because they so unnecessarily wreck stuff. Then on Sunday I had asked people for lunch after church but they'd said no — for good reasons and not just because they didn’t want to. So I came home to assemble my IKEA furniture, only to discover that instead of providing an Allen key I actually needed a screw driver (imagine that!) and I couldn’t find one, so I ended up walking up the road for a screw driver. I was hoping that my flatmate would actually have a hammer when she came home, but no, so I walked back up the road to get a hammer (went into the variety store and bought a cheap pink one, just to perpetuate the silly blonde thing, but it worked fine). Then at work this morning my computer wouldn’t start and I couldn’t do anything, and now, because they didn’t replace it when it was showing signs of dying, I have lost everything off the hard-drive, so I had to be totally set up again with programs etc and wasted most of the day at work.

But all the niggling little mishaps reinforced a few lessons about patience and acceptance and kindness and self-control — as I crawled along in traffic and told myself to smile and be nice to all the people who bumped into me in the shops, and apologise to all the people I bumped into, and not get too frustrated with the people dawdling along like they were sight-seeing in IKEA (perhaps they were!), or worse, the people who actually step backwards without looking and smash into you, and deleted my blog comments and bit my tongue instead of raving on to manager when she came to see how my computer fiasco was turning out — and about the fact that “a cup brimful of sweetness can’t spill one drop of bitterness no matter vigorously shaken” or whatever that saying is. Perhaps a better way to say it is that out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks (Luke 6:45). Circumstances or other people can never make you sin, they can just let the lurking sin manifest itself - unfortunately!

(And I appreciate that compared to the week of some in this country mine was nothing! Things could have been a whole lot worse than a chipped decorative thing and a small burn on my arm!)