Monday, June 4, 2012

{When Our Plans Are Thrown Crazily Out of Loop}

My schedule for list Tuesday included:
Devotions
Finish all written assignments {history}
Make Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins
Learn A major chord
CD for Mrs. Gol----
5 gifts
Do you also see how almost nothing's crossed off?

sigh.

Tuesday morning I was making smoothies for breakfast. Nothing too abnormal about that, right? I sent Jenna out to the garage freezer for some blueberries and turned on the blender. J came back, and said we had a problem. Ellie had left the freezer door cracked the night before and the freezer... wasn't cold. And neither was most of our food.

double sigh.

The kiddos drank their smoothies while Mom and I went out to access the damage. The completely full freezer had thawed raspberry juice dripping down onto every shelf, one could actually poke the squishy meat, and a container of ice cream looked more like milk.

triple sigh.

We threw out 16 cups of cooked, diced chicken, all the raspberries, 16 hamburger patties, a few bags of corn and that ice cream. We decided to keep all the blueberries and all the jam.

That left us with 6 roasts and 3 packages of stew meat, all 75% thawed.  We buy our beef in bulk. :)

Momma and I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the freezer, calling neighbors to borrow crockpots, picking up crockpots in the wagon, mixing up recipes and browning stew meat. That afternoon, I began to see the comedy in the situation when our counter looked like this:
There was stew meat, shredded BBQ beef, beef for Beef and Noodles, and a roast in the oven.
But there were positives to the situation. I started counting them and before long, I was adding them to the list. 

1. That we caught this before all of our food was ruined
2. The fact that we were able to save the jam and blueberries
3. We now have several meals already cooked and in the freezer
4. Our freezer has never been this clean!
5. Our freezer was actually pretty empty- by the end of the year, it will be full to the brim with our new 1/2 cow, around 40 pounds of blueberries, fresh freezer jam, more chicken and who knows what else! God had a perfect time planned for this to happen.
6. The fact that...
 My history assignments didn't get done. (They actually still aren't.) I was worn out of kitchen work and so didn't make the muffins.  I don't know the A major chord for the guitar, and Mrs. Gol----'s cd still isn't in the mail. 

BUT...

My schedule was thrown out for God's schedule.

and maybe that's worth a sigh of delight.

3 comments:

Elizabeth said...

Oh, Lindsey... <3 What a day. :) We call that just "doing life". :) And in case it makes any difference, I didn't get any government done last week because life just got in the way. :)

Thank you for reminding me of this perspective!! It's all too easy to get upset because things aren't going the way we planned... but I guess I'd rather have things go the way God planned, huh? ;)

Well, aren't you glad you are learning how to do all this kind of stuff - making food, using up a lot of meat, and (dare I say it) clean the freezer?!?! haha

May the Lord bless the rest of your day and may you not be too stressed out from a day of unplanned adventures. :)

Love,
Elizabeth

Leah said...

Hi Lindsey!

Sometimes everything else gets thrown out the window for God's plan, but God's plan is worth so much more than our plan!

Oh, and just so you know you're not alone, Abby left the freezer open when she was little too. And we had friends over for dinner. :) To help us eat our thawed meat. :)

Love,

Leah

Laura said...

Oh Lindsey, what a day you had...thank goodness you and that resourceful momma of yours came up with so many good solutions! I'm so glad that you added the unexpected challenges to your list of GIFTS!