I’m having a little problem with my car. She’s a lovely car, very reliable, totally fun to drive and I don’t want to say anything against her really but I think maybe she loves me too much and is being over protective.
You see, although I have very politely asked many times for her to stop, she will still lock the doors whenever I start the car, locking me in. I think she is concerned that someone will car-jack me at a traffic light or something but I feel that’s unlikely to happen.
Also, once the doors are locked, they are very reluctant to open again. I click the button and I hear the mechanism unlock but then the door immediately locks itself once more. At the moment, when I wish to get out of the car, I must wind down the window (that’s manual by the way, no electric windows in this car – which may be a good thing the way things are going) and find the lock with the key and turn it to unlock the door. The lock catches inside the doors broke years ago. They just flap uselessly.
And I have a fear that the driver’s door will start to act like the passenger door. That one sometimes can’t even be opened with the key. It immediately locks again as soon as you release pressure on the key. If that happens on the driver’s side then I will be reduced to climbing out the window Dukes of Hazard style. That will not be graceful!
So I can tell you what DH will be working on this weekend!
Now unlocking through the window is a reasonable work around and most of the time it’s ok. But I have to admit that this morning when I turned up to work and parked and found myself locked into the car again, I almost decided that it would be easier to spend the day in the car. Almost.
I think that like most people, my ability to handle small frustrations like this is totally dependent on how I am feeling about everything else in my life. If life is going smoothly and I am not feeling overwhelmed then I can handle the little things, I can laugh at the little things, they are small pebbles in the road of life and I am glad to have them happening because they give me something to write about. But when I am having an off day, when I have not slept well and my head hurts and I have a busy day ahead, then these little issues become pot holes at the very least, jarring me, shaking me up. And sometimes they are pebbles in the shoe, constant small irritations. Or they are mountains in the road. Enough to stop me from moving forward.
The car locking mechanism has been playing up for a few weeks now. No-one has had the time to work on it and I haven’t worried about it. It’s been an intermittent problem and I’ve been fairly intermittent in how I’ve responded to it. Some days it’s been amusing, some days irritating, and mornings like today it’s been almost enough to send me back home and back to bed. (The day got much better, BTW).
Many of the letters in the bible start with the words ‘Grace and peace to you’. If you know you’re forgiven and loved, if you are surrounded by that grace, then you can extend peace to those around you. You are able, from your place of forgiven-ness and unconditional loved-ness to respond peacefully to these irritations that come your way. If you know the supernatural peace that comes from knowing that there is a plan, that you don’t have to be in control of every circumstance, then you can extend grace to those around you and allow others to be irritating within the cushioning that comes from the grace.
I think it’s like breathing in grace and breathing out peace. Then breathing in peace and breathing out grace. And laughing at the little things, the imperfections in life. Because this side of eternity there will always be imperfections, even if it’s something as small as an overprotective car.
So for you my readers I pray ‘Grace and peace to you’ and I hope you pray the same for me. And I hope that after tomorrow I will be able to jump out of my car easily again and will never take it for granted!