Today has been incredibly frustrating. I couldn't sleep last night at all. I wasn't dealing with any particular anxiety concern...I blame it mostly on a dinner of coke and junior mints. We had family movie night last night. I took the wife and kid to see the new Narnia movie.
So I was up very late, probably fell asleep at about 2am. Then the wife, being th gem that she is...(I'm incredibly blessed to have that woman in my life)..allowed me to sleep in until 830. Church starts at 10am. I muddled around a bit and finally was ready to go at 9:40. Perfect timing.
Then I couldnt find the car keys. Anywhere. I have to admit, I lost my cool a bit. I wasn't the prefect model of Christian temperance and patience. I started blaming everyone around me for why they had disappeared. Everywhere I looked that was a pile of something. This drives me nuts. Piles of magazines, bills, papers, food, trash etc. When I do set something down somewhere, it can get sucked in to a black hole of piles. Why is it so hard to throw things away? So mostly it was my wife's fault for the lost keys. Had I been able to see a counter or table top, I probably would have been able to find the keys that I had placed somewhere I shouldn't have placed them.
Then it became my son's fault, because he had probably run off with them or stashed them in an insane place in the disaster area of a room he keeps back there. So for over an hour, I fumed around looking in impossible places, digging through a disgusting bag of garbage, and generally cursed my lot in life. I began to wonder how I was going to make it to work the next day. To top it off, I'm driving a rental car because my car is in the shop. (I forgot to put on the parking brake and it rolled through two neighbors yards into a copse of trees. I like to say the word copse.) So then I started thinking..if I've lost the rental keys I'm really in trouble. We have a single car driveway, and I had blocked my wife's car in with the keyless rental car.
Things were starting to look bleak.
Then I found them. Someone had put a loaf of bread on top of them right next to the sink.
OK...I calmed down...I moved on with life, I finished cleaning the house since I had started to organize our lives whilst going room to room trying to find the keys. Thankfully, my son had been an angel all morning and pretended he was a ninja outside in the yard.
So I rolled to work. I had some catching up to do. I wasn't meeting any clients so i dressed like a thug from Baltimore. Deep down, thats what I am. A street smart white kid from B-more. I wore some urban jeans and put on a hoodie. I had to close a deal, but all that was getting done over the phone. I rolled through the back door at the office and set the alarm off. No big deal...I just needed to click the remote switch I keep on my car keychain. I looked down at the rental keychain I had in my hand. The alarm kept going. The 30 second mark hit and the place went nuts. In about 3 minutes the police had arrived, hands on glocks, and I was dressed like I just broke into the place.
The day just kept getting better.
Well, I'll spare you the details, but it took showing the cops the pic of me and the wife I had sitting on my desk to calm them down. Now I'm home and I want to make two points from this story. The first one is this. I went from happy to victim mode in all of one second today. I was so mad at the world for making me miss church, when in reality, I'm the only person responsible for not putting me keys on the table by the door. I had just read recently, that one of the greatest obstacles to holiness is discouragement, and an exaggerated sense of anxiety. Man did I go there fast today. I need to do better.
My second point is this. I don't know who is making these CS Lewis movies, but I'm so happy and pleased to watch a Christian theme on the big screen. In fact, every time I sit through one of those flicks I tear up. It's very emotional to me to watch Lewis' work come to life in a way thatI think he'd be proud of. You know, I read those books as a kid, and even made believe that I was in Narnia etc. but I never understood the depth of the Christian theology at work in those stories. As an adult, it blows my mind. For example, Edmund and Lucy are told that they have ourgrown their time in Narnia, (which always made me sad as a kid when I read those books), so Aslan comforts them saying: "In your world, I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." That's the kind of stuff that makes me cry a bit in a kids movie. Because someone in Hollywood was brave enough to put that in there. It was nice. But I drank too much soda.
For a great article on Christian references in The Dawn Treader, check this out:
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