day 64: complaints turned to a cool story (perspective)

right now we live (temporarily until the end of next month) in an apartment. almost every night we fall asleep to the sounds of quite the african party next door & a german shepherd (or elephant) doing laps above us. (i'm convinced they put red bull in his water bowl every night...or something to that effect).

but today we woke up before 8am to the incessant sounds of hammers & saws on the floor above our heads. i tried to maintain my sanity, but after 3 hours i was pretty sure they'd hit every single square inch available. needless to say, i MUCH prefer the dog to the hammers.

SOME banging??

we headed out early this afternoon so sarah could practice driving (continue PRAYing about that my friends...) & realized something wasn't right with the car. so we called up bruce (our stand-in dad) & asked him to drive the car & see what he thought. of course though, just like when my own dad gets in the car, it seemed fine. so we went on about our day. a few hours later, the car just stopped. so far this week we've had a side mirror re-duct-taped back on (yes, that's what i said!), a full-service oil & filter change, new spark plugs, a new fan belt, 2 new tires & a new muffler...
& yet, after all that (not to mention a very full tank of gas), she just stopped.
right there in the middle of the intersection.
cool.

long story short we sputtered (quite literally) over to the closest team member's house & called bruce...again. he followed us BACK over to the car place. the car died 6 more times on the way...& always right in the middle of intersections. the locals were quite amused. within 10 minutes of our arrival at the car place, the problem was solved - something about moisture & the engine.

there she is...3rd time in 4 days!

& yet with the car problem solved, we'd somehow lost bruce along the way. we'd gotten separated at a stop light. he never showed back up.

WHY?
as bruce stopped at the light & we sputtered on, he noticed a man standing nearby. it was in that moment that the man (who has alzheimer's) had a stroke & fell straight back onto the ground & into traffic. bruce was able to stop the traffic behind him, call 911 & wait with the man until help arrived.

with all of our annoying little "problems," we've been quite tempted to complain.
BUT...
had all of these things not happened when they did & exactly how they did...
who knows what would have happened to that man?
#perspective

how often we complain about things which we do not understand!
His ways are higher...that's for sure!