The Dangers of Shopping on a Rainy Day

I had the most traumatic experience of my life when it comes to shopping, but it wasn't as traumatic as you may imagine. It started with the idea of multi-tasking. I wanted to take our car in for an oil change, trying to be more responsible with the car my wife owned before we got married. Usually I move slowly but last Saturday I was going to get the oil changed no matter what. I had to take the car up a floor since there was no place to park it. While trying to juggle a book, a folder, a laptop and an umbrella I dropped the book and folder. One person saw me drop it and made a verbal sound, somehow seeming to express her condolences without saying anything directly to me. Then I completely lost it when I stepped on a flat escalator comparable to the picture above except the escalator was going down. And I went down and landed hard on my right arm. Even though I was wearing a jacket and a sweatshirt, I managed to hurt my arm bad enough to keep a bandage on the wound every day since then. Unfortunately, the computer was my wife's and I just happened to drop it on the corner where the switch was. Fortunately, she could still turn it on but we took it to the Samsung After-service center around the block and they were able to fix it temporarily. I learned that day that I'm not invincible. It is really quite a shame that we brought all those things with us because we didn't get much accomplished that day, certainly not enough to justify all of that work. This whole experience made me wonder how many times I could have been hurt like that. I seem to recall other instances where I start to feel my feet shifting from under me but I always managed to regain my composure when I didn't have my hands full. I'm probably over-analyzing, like a good INTJ tends to do, but I can't help but wonder if God's voice was somehow in the midst of all of that, saying, "Give those things to me so you can stand." Actually, these days we seem to feel quite burdened as we develop more and more of what it means to be married and what ordained ministry might look like, whether we want to step into that role or not. I guess it really is true that less is more.

I'm Prejudiced

I hope I spelled that right. This is my latest, and perhaps the most difficult revelation, that has come to my attention. I've been having a lot of battles with my wife. I thought, perhaps we thought, it was because of vision or my wanting to become an ordained minister of some kind, but it seems that the real problem is prejudice? My crime? I apparently thought that if a Korean woman loved me at all it was because I am an American and that I could be her ticket to freedom. Fortunate for me, for a lot of growth, I didn't marry a Korean who was scouting her odds of being matched up with an American. Somehow she just fell in love with this odd duck. If you know me at all, you may be either thinking what a hypocrite I am or perhaps you are one of my many good friends who thinks I need to cut myself a little slack. To be honest with you, I'm not sure where I stand myself. I will say there is a strange sense of peace after going out and shopping by myself, something I probably haven't done since I got married. And one of the shocking places I found myself was in the car section. Actually, that shouldn't be so shocking. I've been into cars since I was in elementary or middle school. My first vow of independence to myself and God was to show my dad and brother that I could fix a car on my own. I mostly succeeded at that, except when I tried to change ball joints on my '78 Ford Fairmont and I wound up taking the whole front end apart. I learned a lot but the mechanic wasn't happy with me at all. And here I am, under different circumstances, and the same feeling of peace and confusion and disappointment, all at the same time. I suppose things will be okay. I hope they will. But the blessing and the curse of this mystery that there is no certainty on how everything will turn out. But something tells me I am right where I need to be, which makes me all the more indebted to my wife who happens to be from another country. I hope I can learn to see her as my wife without the culture or the ethnicity. Does she really see me that way?