Lord Of The Normal

Nothing extraordinary happened over the weekend.

Ginny and I shopped for groceries, office supplies, and for materials for next month’s neighborhood watch meeting.

My friend Rex came over Saturday afternoon and most of the day Sunday to install the rain gutters on our house. He works in heavy industry and is skilled at all phases of construction, mechanical, and metal work. As he worked I felt absolutely useless. I do not do well on ladders and I have trouble standing up when I kneel on the ground. This limits what I’m able to do and it feels odd to be the object of Rex’s charity. I’d rather be a giver than a receiver.

However, I’m very thankful that Rex has helped us so often and in so many ways. Without his aid, we’d be living in a shanty.

I did get the new garden shed erected all by myself. That’s something. And I killed another rat which had escaped from the old shed.

Ginny and I reviewed several plans about what to do with the space tearing down the old shed created.

We enjoyed the normal weekend flow of friends, family, visitors and phone calls.

In fact the word normal well describes our life this weekend.

Nothing wrong with that, Jesus is Lord of the normal as well as of the extraordinary. Bland is beautiful.

One funny thing did happen:

A little boy from the neighborhood, who is somewhere between five and ten years old, was looking at the cover photo on my book, A Dirty Old Man Goes Bad.

As he thumbed through the pages, the boy asked me if there were any other pictures in the book.

His dad remarked that from the cover photo, it looks as though I was burying a body in my back yard.

The kid, who’d been half listening to our conversation, perked up exclaiming, “You buried a body in your back yard”?

I replied, “No. … No… Not yet”.

The expression on his face was hilarious!