What a Mess I Am!

(Me, with my grand girls a couple of months ago.)

I stuck my lunch in the microwave and punched in the recommended six minutes. Then I returned to my laptop and got distracted by email.

After a few minutes—it felt like four or five minutes—my nose detected an overcooked smell coming from the kitchen. But, heck, my nose must have been mistaken because nothing is overcooked after only four or five minutes, right?

I went back to my email. But a ‘minute’ later, the overcooked smell was turning to the burning smell. I went to investigate. That’s when I noticed the countdown display on the microwave at forty-five minutes.

Uh oh. Must’ve accidentally punched in an extra 0. So now the microwave thinks it should cook for 60 minutes, not 6 minutes.

Dummy Dena! I punched cancel, turned on the fan and opened the microwave door. Smoke billowed forth. My chicken pot pie was a total loss.

I opened the kitchen door and tried to shoo the noxious-ness out. Even pumping the door to try to draw in good clean air only accomplished turning the kitchen into an icebox—a stinky icebox. (Temperatures have hovered in the teens this entire week.)

Darn! I was really in the mood for a nice, piping hot, comfy-food chicken pot pie.

I thought, this must happen all over the USA at least ten times a day. I love machines and I love that they never question my orders. They just do whatever they’re programmed to do.

Nine-nine times out of a hundred, when something goes wrong, it’s not the machine’s fault. It’s you-know-who’s fault.

I am so consistently fallible:

I forget dates
I lose papers I really, really need
I make snap—almost always incorrect—judgments
I can’t come up with the word or phrase I need right now
I say or do something I shouldn’t or don’t say the right thing or do the right thing
I forget all of God’s benefits…

…and so on.

So now, to make me a little less fallible, I keep a little calendar in my purse. I train myself to always put my important papers in the same place, I counsel myself not to make snap judgments, I warn myself to keep my mouth shut., and prod myself to get up and do what I know I should.

And most importantly, the sixth item on my agenda to not be quite so fallible: I’m training myself to notice and thank God for ALL his benefits: every fleeting moment of northwest sunshine, every trill of a bird, even a burned meal, because I’ve got more good stuff in my freezer, every morning that I wake up and can still see, feel, move, touch, or think.

Thankfulness to God will override those moments of complete exasperation at my own fallibility.