A few years back Dave built a workshop. He had wanted one for a long time. He needed a place where all his power tools and hand tools could be reached easily. He been doing all of his projects in the garage and on the driveway. A less than preferred way to achieve optimal success with his projects. He had done this without much complaint. It was time to him to have a real shop. My husband is a planner. He builds things in his head, many times over, before he even cuts the first board. No blue prints, no drawings just an idea in that marvelous brain of his.
The biggest hurdle was setting a level floor support and subfloor. The ground is so hard but after several days work the concrete pillars were in perfect square and level, subfloor was down and he started framing it in. With help from neighbors the framed walls went up and Dave was ready to move forward.
Earlier in the week I called and ordered the metal sheeting for the roof. “It will be here by Thursday afternoon Mrs. Wilson. You can pick it up on Friday.” Great! Austin, our son-in-law, had volunteered to come down and help Dave for the weekend so this was good. Except when I called on Thursday to verify that they had the roofing, they didn’t.
Really! Now what?
We still needed more building materials so we drove to Tucson, borrowed a friend’s utility trailer and went shopping. Lumber, siding, door, windows, nails. I went to the desk to check on the roofing. As the manager of the department was explaining to me that it hadn’t come in, he clicked the inventory screen to show me and our 20 sheets of roofing appeared in his inventory.
Hallelujah! But now the hunt was on. If it’s in inventory where is it?
Dave and I kept shopping. The manager went to find it. He looked…and looked…and looked. Good thing we had lots of boards to get and siding to load. We kept busy while he looked. And then we saw him, coming toward us with a lumber cart and on top of it was shiny corrugated roofing, 20 sheets of it!
If we had been angry, and that’s what we were tempted to be, we would have ruined our day and that of the sales floor employees we encountered that morning. Instead we were able to keep our joy and get our product. In fact, we had a very nice young man go with us to help load everything we bought.
Thank you Jesus!
“Dear brothers and sisters, I close my letter with these last words: Be joyful. Grow to maturity. Encourage each other. Live in harmony and peace. Then the God of love and peace will be with you.” II Corinthians 13:11 NLT
We never know where we will find joy. That day we found it in the lumber aisles of Lowe’s. Sometimes we need to be like the manager of the lumber department – we know joy is there, we just have to keep looking until we find it.