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.