Yesterday was one of those interminably long days that can only be compared to the night before Christmas or the months before a new baby is born. It's not that I was waiting for something to happen that I had no control over, though. It's just that I thought the day would never end. I was wading through all the IRS audit stuff. We are trying to get that behind us as quickly as possible, but you can only move as fast as your copy machine will take you. Meanwhile, visions of canceled checks and mileage logs are dancing in my head. I got the last external piece of the puzzle last night at church – a letter from our church financial secretary. That needs to be copied and entered into the mix. Then I have to put it all in some sort of order and write some sort of cover letter with words like, "enclosed please find …" Then all that's left is finding an envelope big enough to hold all the pages, getting it to the post office and paying for the postage. Thank you so much, Uncle Sam, for giving us 30 days from the date you wrote the letter (rather than from the date we received it, which was a little more than a week later) to send it back.
Chris made me take a break at some point during the day. I tend to lose all track of time when I get focused like that. I revert back to baseball card sorting mode. I used to sit for hours at a time with my baseball cards, putting them in team order or number order or favorite-player order or position-they-play order. About the only thing that could stop me was … well, when I had to get to class. That all happened when I was in seminary. I spent a lot of time with them when I was a kid, too.
Anyway, our break. We had to go pick up Mom at Libbie's Place, so we did some errand running first. Of course we had to stop in at WalMart. We do live in Galveston, after all. How could we miss our time, however brief, in the social center of the Island? We saw a lady and her son from church and even had a chance to talk to the director of Galveston Urban Ministries, one of the ministry groups we support. We also picked up a prescription at Randall's and went to Office Depot. All that copying used up just about all the ink in our printer. But the new experience for me was our quick visit to a place called Tuesday Morning, located between Randall's and Office Depot. Chris had seen an article about its opening in the paper, so we had to satisfy our curiosity. And I must say I was kind of impressed. I expected another one of those high-priced, stuff you don't need kind of places. But this was an odd place. And I enjoy odd places. The best description I could come up with was "very classy dollar store." It's not that everything was a dollar, but the prices were very low. And they had a little bit of everything, just not a lot of anything. And the stuff was what you might expect to see in a dollar store, only better quality. Check it out. Tuesday Morning. Or go on Wednesday like we did.
Isaiah 33:5-6 says, "The Lord is exalted, for he dwells on high; he will fill Zion with justice and righteousness. He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge; the fear of the Lord is the key to this treasure."
Father, thank you for walking with us through this IRS stuff. It was good to remember we were not alone as we "rendered unto Caesar." Amen.
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