Being flexible

Sometimes we have to be careful not to invest too much faith in our plans. (Actually, I suppose "plans" could be replaced with pretty much anything, aside from things like "God," or "Savior".) When we can avoid that, we can end up receiving unexpected blessings.

For a month or so, mrs. tg and I had planned to host our marriage encounter group last Saturday evening. In a real leap of faith (there's that word again) for her, we'd also agreed to make a short presentation to the other couples - I simply can't convey how out of character it was for her to agree to this. So when we went to MD for Unc's services, we took along the book The Seven Levels of Intimacy, by Matthew Kelly, as our planned resource for this presentation. Rather than have her wade through the whole thing, which I'd already read (twice), I had her focus on a few sections that I thought would lend themselves well to the short time we'd have available to us - about ten minutes. Though the book's main points couldn't really be covered in less than an hour, there were a few gems that I thought might fit well together for a shorter presentation.

Anyway, mrs. tg read through the suggested pages before bed one night in MD, but we didn't have a chance to discuss it at that point. A couple days after we were back home she went through them again, making notes on things that she thought were worth sharing. It happened that we agreed completely on what we should work into our talk, and over the next couple days we were able to get things pretty well ready. The only real down side was that, while we were glad to be getting together with this group of friends, we were going to miss a parish event that was slated for the same evening.

By Friday it was looking as if only two other couples from the group would be available. Sometimes, though, the smaller meetings are nicest, a chance to really get to know one another better. But when we got back to the house late Saturday afternoon after some shopping, we had a message from one of them: the wife was sick and they wouldn't be able to make it. While listening to the message, the other couple called. A family situation had come up that required their immediate attention.

In truth, we were pretty excited about our presentation, and I'd been a little disappointed to share it with only a few people, especially for mrs. tg's sake. Now we have it tucked away for future use, hopefully with more of the group available. And since we weren't wrapped up in disappointment over our plans falling through, we realized we were suddenly free to participate in the tri-parish Eucharistic procession through the community (streets closed off, drummer providing cadence; such processions are still a key part of the Catholic experience in many parts of the world) and Benediction that evening. This turned out to be a really neat event, with dinner beforehand and dessert after and lots of nice fellowship. Oh, and our associate pastor shared his wonderful first experience of donating blood in his native India; the virtually destitute family of the young (9-year-old) recipient was so grateful they ultimately received Christ and converted!