God's Joyful Surprise

God's Joyful Surprise is the name of a devotional book by Sue Monk Kidd. I read it when I was in college, and while I don't remember a single devotion, the title has always stayed with me. I think of it when it occurs to me that God has once again taken something bad, and made it a very good thing.

Take, for example, the insane price of gas. It's a bad thing, no doubt about it. Bad, and only getting worse.

But because of the rising cost of gas, Mark and I started doing something this summer we've never done before. We started carpooling. We've always worked in the same office, but our schedules never quite clicked, so we always drove separately. This summer, however, gas prices made us give up our selfish ways. We cut out 30-40 minutes of driving a day, essentially cutting our cost of gas in half. Not to mention wear and tear on the cars.

This carpooling thing has been so lucrative, that we've continued it even with the boys back in school. We drop Ben off at 7:30, D off at 7:45, and we roll into the office at 8:00. I leave in the afternoon and pick up D, then come back for Mark. We stop off on the way home to get Ben. It's a bit of a hassle - sometimes D and I sit in the parking lot for 20 minutes or so while we wait for Mark to wrap things up - but it's worth it.

And here's the really amazing thing. The time we four spend in the car in the morning, and in the afternoon, has been golden. GOLDEN. Nobody's playing video games, or blogging, or watching TV. We're all together. We talk about the day to come, or the day we just had, we practice spelling words, we touch base on our schedules. And we laugh. We laugh a lot. We slow the pace down, and we just enjoy being together. Thirty to forty minutes has made such an amazing difference in my days.

"What you intended for evil, God intended for good." God's joyful surprise.