Joy in the midst of chaos

It's amazing to me how many times I have to get all the way through the lesson before I realize that G's been teaching me all along. Actually it's kinda of sad really, but still amazing that He is faithful in the midst of my humanness. Maybe one of these days I'll actually get it right away....here's hoping!

So anyway, B and I took our househelper and my African mama, Neene, to a city about 3 hours away this weekend. She wanted to see her family and begged us to take her and since we had just finished with a team we decided to take a vaca day and enjoy the restaurants and A/C (nope we don't have it in our house). We left in the afternoon with "plenty" of time to get there, but you know...we live in Africa so we should have given ourselves like 6 hours instead of 3. We assumed....there was the mistake....that Neene knew where her sister lived. I mean, I know where my brother lives. Don't you know where your siblings live?! We arrived to find that her sister's phone was off and she had NO CLUE where she lived because she'd never been there. We called her sister's husband who gave us a neighborhood so then we left to track that down.

Enter stopping at four random places and asking ten random people the name of some random neighborhood over the course of an hour. Now enter Neene seeing someone vaguely familar and kidnapping him for the next two hours as we tried to find this neighborhood. Turns out that we were given the wrong name! So finally after backtracking the same roads for three hours and stopping every 10 minutes to ask more people we FINALLY found them and got to their house.

Now enter the joyous part....B and I were tried, frustrated and feeling really irritated. Not at Neene per say but just at the situation. We had expected to get to the city, get a hotel room, swim, relax, eat at the place by the water, sleep for 9 hours in the A/C and then do a little shopping the next morning. Instead we got to the city and by this time barely had time to get to a restaurant before they close, sleep for 6 hours and then rush around to do the things we could have done the night before. So we were irritated.

But when Neene's family saw her and came RUNNING out to greet her, calling her name and clapping their hands.....man, all that frustration and irritability melted away into "I am so selfish and stupid". Turns out, she hadn't seen her sister's family for 2o years!!!! Can you believe that?! And they are only 3 hours apart!! My Father just slapped me upside the head and I felt so humbled by the fact that even though I am thousands of miles away from my family, I get to see them every week. All of that running around and "life in Africa" stuff didn't even matter anymore because a family had been reunited.

The more I thought about it the more I realized that joy in the midst of chaos is really hard and it's a lesson that I have to keep learning and learning especially lately. Really relying on Him for my joy and not my circumstances is incredibly difficult, but it's so much more peaceful. Those three hours of frustration could have been spent in excited anticipation for my Neene and her family, praying for their reunion and their souls. It could have been spent sharing a story with her about the Father's love for us and His joy each time one of us turns back to Him. Instead, I, like normal, had to learn that lesson the hard way and opt for my own selfishness instead of His joy in the middle of temporary unpleasantness.

Hopefully next time I will not be so slow to be joyful :)