October 22 – “Nope. Pongo”

We found out this weekend what role now-four-year-old Luke wants to play for Halloween.  Pongo.  Yep.  The dog from 101 Dalmatians.  And he wants his baby sister to go as Pongo’s wife (I don’t remember her name).  And he has a “real dog collar” to wear.  And his candy bag will instead be a doggie food bowl.  And he and his Mom have printed out and cut out and colored (I know.  Dalmatians are black and white.  But he colored their collars) 99 paper Dalmatians to be their puppies.  This from the kid who just had a Batman themed birthday party.  Now, Mom’s original idea was for Luke to be Peter Pan and AnnaGrace to be Tinkerbell and for the older two to be lost boys.  The response of Luke?  “No.  I’m going to be Pongo.”  The response of the older two?  “Uh … no, Mom.”  Seems Zak and Caleb want to be characters out of the Halo video game.  Poor Christi.  But, hey, you gotta love an already-creative Mom with a Pinterest account.

So Josh and his family arrived Thursday evening, and he was up at 5 a.m.  He was joining a group from his Waco church over in Port Arthur.  They were doing some hurricane relief mucking out of a house.  To let Christi have their car in case we needed to go anywhere, Josh took our truck.  He rolled onto the ferry, rolled the power windows down, and sat back to enjoy the ride.  And then it got noticeably colder.  And then it started to rain.  He tried to roll up the windows … and discovered one of the little quirks of our 25 year old GMC classic.  You can’t roll the driver’s side window all the way down.  Takes too much effort for it to return to its closed position, so it simply sits there.  The only way I have found to deal with it (other than not rolling that window down) is to start the engine and at that very moment hit the roll up button.  The result jolt wakens the sleeping gears and the sudden burst of adrenaline is just enough to force the window back up.  We forgot to share that little detail.  He texted Christi a little before 7 a.m. to see if I was awake yet and could I send him the key for the cranky window.  The fix worked for him, and he was finally on his way.  Their team worked most of the day, but Josh still made it back here a little before seven that night.  Long day.

1 John 4:11 says, “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”

Father, thank you for taking care of Josh’s team as the worked on mucking this weekend.  Be with the folks to our East who are still dealing with those early stages of hurricane trauma.  Amen.