Lessons from the Home Depot...

Rain. It’s pouring outside at the moment. My workout schedule was shot to pieces this week. I have been thrown from my routine. I’ve only gone once. Just so you know, I’m not being selfish and paying for a gym membership or anything. We happen to have a recreation center where I live that paid for as part of the homeowner’s association dues.
Wah, wah, wah.
That reminds me. I need to cancel Netflicks ( I had a chick flick flashback, sorry).
Okay, got that done.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Rain.
We had another long day yesterday but not as bad as the one before. I say we because the wife was in the mood to get some pent up frustrations off her chest too. We sat in my office for a good long while and talked and cried. I think we even felt better afterwards. We discovered that part of our frustration stems from family and friends trying to give advice on what we need to be doing, namely me updating the old resume and getting a new job.
I get that. That’s actually in the handbook for the Recently Unemployed. Yeah, I read it there once, Chapter two, paragraph 12, subsection 3a.

“The newly unemployed should immediately upon his or her dismissal from the previous place of employment begin his or her new job search in earnest. No time should be spared. No rest taken. Panic should immediately set in and unless you find a job within fifteen minutes of losing your old one, everything will implode in a deafening white flash of subatomic particles losing their nuclear bonds and vaporizing your lazy worthless carcass out of existence….”

Maybe that was my sister in law that said that. I don’t really remember.
At any rate, my wife felt like she shouldn’t have to remind the entire free world that it’s only been a few days.
Wow. It seems like its been much longer than that. Tomorrow will make it one week exactly.
The world has ended. The sun has not gone supernova and I am, contrary to scientific theory, still here with all my molecules in their proper place.
Thank you, God.
I am still waiting on him by the way. I would have though he’d have called by now. He’s got a lot on his plate. It’s cool. I am doing what I heard my Dad’s pastor say during the sermon last Sunday.
“You do your part, God will do his.”
I’m doing my part and God will do his.
What’s my part? I’ll let you know as soon as I figure that part out. I think it has something to do with my long held desire to be creative and get paid for it. Whether that means writing or drawing or whatever, I think that’s what I am supposed to be doing. So that’s the plan for now. Clean up the old website and get all my designs dusted off and out there for viewing.
I need to dust off a lot of things.
You know, hope, charity, concern for my fellow man and all those other things that make it cool to be human.
Those are the things I lost along the way. That was another epiphany our little session yesterday generated. I realized that I had grown completely selfish and self absorbed over the last few years.
I used to be the sort of person that would pull over and help an old couple change their tire on the side of the express way and refuse the knot of bills they would inevitably try to hand me when I was done.
“That’s okay. You guys reminded me of my grandparents. I just hope that if they are in a similar situation, God will send someone to help them too…”
Now? Now I don’t even see the people on the side of the road.
Let me give you a fer instance.
The Confesor and I needed to swing by the Home Depot to get a plank of water resistant wall board (that’s the green sheet rock, okay?). He wandered off for wax toilet seals or something along those lines while I waited with the cart near the building supplies.
And I waited.
And waited.
After five or ten minutes I was starting to get a little irritated. I could be home working on web designs instead of standing around like an unemployed jackass in the contractor’s section of the local Home Depot.
Ah, there he is.
He walked past me without a word and proceeded to help the guy behind me that was silently struggling with loading his cart with fifteen or so panels of wall board.
I felt like a turd in dirty jeans.
I didn’t even see the guy. I was too caught up in my wallowing that I failed to notice someone that could have used my idle hands to lighten his load a little.
What would Jesus do?
He would have done exactly what Confesor did.
Point taken, lesson learned.
I want to be that guy on the side of the road, shirt sleeves rolled up, sweat dripping off the brow, helping the single mom with the three kids in the broken down station wagon in the middle of the summer instead of the guy zipping past at fifty five miles an hour sipping on my lemonade.
That’s my prayer for today, to make me see the need around me and find ways to fill it just as surely as I need my needs filled. After all, if I don’t pay attention to those I should be helping, why should I expect anyone else to pay attention to me?