One of the not-quite-completed tasks on my April list was to finish Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, a book I've been meaning to read for more than 15 years. It is kind of a crazy little book. A good kind of crazy, but I am just not there yet on the kind of radical surrender it describes.
I've been trying to practice it while I've been reading, and I expect to blog more about the attempt in the future. This week I have had some particular opportunities to cultivate the spirit of yieldedness that the book describes. Opportunity #1: we are having the paint on our house cleaned up, and this crew is not as careful about wet-scraping and clean-up as I would like them to be. I am trying to be vigilant but not flipped out about the lead hazard.
Opportunity #2: I have to deposit my dissertation this week to graduate next month, and it is pushing a particular button of mine. I have this bureaucratophobia -- an unreasonable fear about situations that require an application to be approved. I get worried that some minor hiccup is going to create chaos and the person wielding the rubber stamps is going to smack my paperwork with the stamp.
I had hoped that this evening I'd be done with the yuckiness: the painters said yesterday that they'd be finished this afternoon and I was going to campus to submit my deposit paperwork. I was looking forward to a nice relaxing day of HEPA-filter vacuuming and windowsill scrubbing and toy washing tomorrow. (They did some work on our windows and got lead-contaminated paint chips and dust inside the room where the toys live. They could see perfectly well what was in there, and I was home. How I wish they had given me a heads-up so I could have moved the toys to another part of the house.)
Instead, both the painting and the deposit process are lingering. The painters didn't finish, or at least they didn't finish by my definition of finish. My wonderful fabulous advisor forgot to have the department head sign a necessary form, and now the head is out of town until Monday.
Neither problem is a big deal in the scheme of things. If the painters flaked out, I'm sure the company owner will tell them to get their butts back here when I let him know what it looks like. If the associate head can't sign the form on the head's behalf, then I'll graduate in August instead of May.
I am hoping that the painters show up at 8am ready to get to work, and that the guy in charge of dissertations is accommodating. At the same time, I'm trying to practice detachment about the outcome. God is sovereign. I am not. God is good. Worry is fruitless.
I am bad at detachment.
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