I'm pretty sure my husband could hear the clutch go out in my brain. He saw the imminent crash into the orange safety cones and told me to go outside for a run. (By the way, I believe that the government doesn't want to actually pay to store those orange cones, so they just move them around I-45 and place them in arbitrary stretches of the highway.) On said run, which was actually an anxiety filled power walk, I stopped. I stopped and cried as I watched the old man orchestrate a kite into the air and make them dance.
The difficulty of daily life here had brought me to the end of sanity as we know it. Between passport issues, internet fickleness, crazy travel schedules, various things breaking in our home, not being able to get medicine for my son without a 4-month running start, and fighting with the postman. Sometimes I feel like our life is like Fred Flintstone in his little running car. No matter how hard or fast our legs are moving, we just aren't going anywhere. We exhaust ourselves trying in hopes of eventually moving forward.
I found myself over by the river on my little mental-breakdown-excerise-excursion, when I stopped to watch the kites and couples sitting together, attempting to make out in a shy and modest fashion. As I stood there, I listened to Dave Crowder Band's Glory of it All. I was trying to listen to a sermon, when I realized that I wasn't paying attention to one word being spoken. My heart needed a Christian "Eye of the Tiger" to remind me that God is bigger than my stupid issues with my DVD player.
I know this sounds contrived, but I promise the kite started dancing in rhythm to the song being played in my ear phones. (They should still be called ear phones and not ear buds in my opinion. Ear buds sound like something with roots has cropped up inside my head. It's a gross phrase and I've vowed not to use it.) As I watched the kites flip and turn and circle overhead, the chords of the music followed in exact harmony. God was reminding me that He hasn't forgotten. I started to cry.
As the kite hit the ground, the older man simply pulled the strings to coax it back up into the air. He didn't run furiously like bees had flown up his pants. He stood there calmly and reminded the kite that it was designed to fly. I needed God to remind me that He does that for me. He picks me up, dusts me off and with a simple truth, reminds me to fly.
