In fact, the main reason I finally broke down to write this post is because it’s 4:00 AM, I have the kind of insomnia that’s curable only by sleeping aids or by solving my problems, and I don’t have my work laptop here to work on the new website.

(“Problem solving” insomnia is my most frequent form. I’ll wake up after 3-4 hours with a problem cycling through my head and be unable to sleep until it is solved. Given that we launch our new website on Monday, I don’t expect to sleep much between then and now.)

So: blogging.

My last blog post was posted in August, but set in June. Since then my life has felt like a series of catastrophes.

• My deadlines have been increasing deadlines at work. See also: new website launch scheduled for Monday.
• My car has been in and out of the repair shop all summer (I’m taking it in again on Friday, in fact). This culminated in a dead battery on Thursday night, followed immediately by a flat tire on Friday (a slow leak, fortunately). I think I’ll have put in around $1500 in repairs all told.
• Two good friends have moved out of state.
• My internet went out again for 3 weeks (not the ISP’s fault; just took me too much time to fix).

In all honesty, none of these things would have been unbearable had they been spread out. But when there’s a new crisis every week for three months straight, it gets to be a bit wearing.

Meanwhile, there were roses.

The thing about the pruning is this: it did indeed lead to rather beautiful roses all summer long. I think the new growth started within a day or two, in fact. They finally died, though, somewhere between mid-August and September. No growth of any sort; just dead buds.

And I thought: this is it for the season.

Between that time and now my car had its second batch of issues (the first batch took 3 mechanics to fix, mind). And the second of the two friends moved. And my modem had issues. And the deadlines increased.

I began to regret choosing roses as the symbol for my apartment.

Except: there is one thing still. And that is this: There is always new growth.

I walked outside about five minutes ago and took this photo. It’s not very good, but it shows something I noticed…yesterday, I think, or the day before.

It is Fall. The buds may not survive a cold snap. Or maintenance may come through and hack away again. Or something else unimaginable may happen to halt their growth.

But there is growth, and there will be growth again. And for now, this is enough.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I’ve sung this song dozens of times over the last decade or so. In all honesty, I’ve never been a huge fan. Repetitive, very little theological depth – but then, I was raised on a steady diet of hymns and Rich Mullins and Degarmo and Key. So I don’t actually know why it made me choke up a little today. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling blessed, surrounded by friends, working at a job I love. And every apartment hurdle has been overcome slowly but surely.

This joy lasted until I walked out to my car and discovered it wouldn’t start.

My immediate thought was that it was the battery, since it had died once a few months before. Mercifully, two friends (Alan and Tina) walked out of the church only a few moments after I did, and with their help and the assistance of one of the facilities managers at church, we spent the next 45 minutes determining that, actually, the battery was fine and it was probably the starter.

“Do you have a remote starter?” asked Alan. Well, yes, though I never use it; I had actually taken it off my keychain several months ago.

I called a tow truck and had them take me to Sears Auto, which is mercifully open on Sundays. “It’s probably the starter,” they said. All signs pointed to being able to drive home.

After about half an hour, they came back. “Do you have a remote starter?”

It turns out that something in the remote starter had gone bad and burned something or other out. And because of how the remote starter was wired in, they didn’t feel comfortable doing the maintenance themselves.

Well, then.

If you ever want to hit me where it hurts, take away my car. You’d think I’d be used to it by now; this car is car #3, the first car having died a sudden, painful death, and the second having died an extended, possibly more painful death. I got to be on a first-name basis with my mechanics back in suburban Detroit. This car, remarkably, had largely escaped major problems; it’s needed maintenance, of course (including one memorable repair that spent all but six pennies of my federal tax return), but I don’t think it’s ever left me functionally stranded before.

It hurts. It hurts to have to rely on friends, however willing they may be. It hurts to not have the flexibility to go where I want to go whenever I want to go. Being without Internet was frustrating, but I could still go to work or Panera to go online. But with the exception of Panera, pretty much anywhere else I’d like to go is outside of walking range, and my job is out in the boonies, far beyond the range that I could reasonably ask anyone to drive me.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I cleaned my car while I waited for the tow truck to arrive. Basically, this involved throwing random bits of rubbish into bags to throw in the trash later. On the floor under the steering wheel I found a single penny.

The story of the pennies is a long one. In brief, it involves me working through some of my debt issues and prayerfully trusting God with my finances. Within a week of making some very important decisions (including the decision to start tithing again) I took my car to the repair shop. I had been planning on using my income tax return for these repairs; though the repairs wound up being much larger than I was expecting, the refund covered it almost exactly. With six cents to spare, in fact. These six pennies got returned to God in that I sent one each to various people who were either involved (directly or indirectly) or needed the encouragement. I think I had planned on keeping one myself – taping it to the steering wheel or something.

It’s doubtful that the penny I found today was one of THE pennies, insomuch as they were ever tangible objects, but still.

God hasn’t let me down yet.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I bring this up because Yi noted that  Michael Phelps consumes between 10,000-12,000 calories each day, but burns so many off that he has trouble gaining weight. Like Yi, my first reaction was that it would be nice to have that problem. I definitely eat more than I burn each day. But it got me thinking: Phelps’ stomach is undoubtedly enlarged. When one day he stops working out nearly as much, will he also think to stop eating so much? Will he be able to retrain his body to desire less food? Or will he one day become one of the millions of Americans who suffers from weight issues because he failed to adapt? I’d love to see a study of former athletes to know if there’s some sort of major weight gain trend among them.

It also makes me wonder about my old teacher. If athletes require that many calories a day, it’s entirely possible that she legitimately was a cheerleading coach once, but didn’t decrease her caloric intake as she stopped exercising heavily. If that was the case–what a horrible fate! It’s bad enough being overweight in a Photoshop world. It would be even worse for one who used to be thin–who had a legitimate claim to fame–but gets discredited just for being the product of a consumer environment.