Last week I was asking, what is God trying to teach me? as my appliances were falling apart and all sort of needs were popping up with no money to meet them.
In the chaos of 2007, we grossly overspent our income, so this year we are paying for it. We are on a Just Say No! campaign. I spent NOTHING last week, not a cent. Yes I did use some gasoline, but I bought nothing. We are clearing with one another all our purchase in advance; this week I'll be buying laundry detergent and sunscreen. I figure that ~~ as it takes 30 days to change a habit ~~ it will take us about a month to move our thinking from Do we need it? to Can we afford it?. The answer to the latter trumps the former.
Anyway, when one is trying to spend nothing and the cooktop dies and the garden needs to be tilled and the seeds need potting soil and there is an anniversary to celebrate and so on and so forth, it is easy to start fretting.
So what is God trying to teach me? As best I can tell it is that He will take care of us. I know that in my head, but it is harder for my heart to remember it, especially at 1:00 in the morning as I lay away and fret. (lie away? argh. If you have a good trick for sorting out lay/lie do let me know, gently of course).
Rotortiller? check
Potting soil? Mom
Cooktop? friend coming over this morning to look at it.
Anniversary Celebration? Mom again (dinner and Kottke tickets: Mom's cool that way)
Fretting? I just have to say no.
4 comments:
Gently speaking, the way I remember lay vs. lie is that lay takes an object (a transitive verb), so you always need to lay [something] down. The mnemonic I use is to think of, "Either lie down or lay yourself down!" (accompanied by a mental picture of my commanding this to my dog) with lie being the intransitive verb and lay being the transitive verb.
The tricky part is that the past tense of lie is, indeed, lay. So if you continue to worry, you will lie away tonight, but you lay away last night.
Of course, there are the self-proclaimed grammar "experts" who will be quick to tell you that you "laid in bed all night," but these are the same folks who will say that, "this picture of my brother and me" should quite obviously be "this picture of my brother and I" and are best disregarded with a polite smile.
I have SO been there. Jehovah Jireh.
My father taught me, chickens lay eggs, but people lie: Does that work?
Thx Sandy! That works.
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