Spanners in all the works

I don't know where the expression of a 'spanner in the works' originates from, but I feel like over the last week I've had enough spanners thrown at me to open up my own tool shop.

Things are not going to plan, friends, and if you have ever had the opportunity to spend time with my control-freak self, you know that I am not dealing with it well.

I have been showing up for everything fully (ahem, mostly) prepared, and finding that circumstances over which I have no control have wreaked havoc over my carefully constructed plans and left me undeniably frazzled.

I'd say it started about a week ago when I turned up at crèche feeling pretty pleased about the prospects for the morning. I had done everything I could have done to be prepared, and that's all it really takes for a morning to go smoothly, right? (Right??)

Wrong.

Everything that could possibly have gone wrong went wrong: we had two leaders not show up; we were short on food because reminders hadn't gone out to parents; I had a parent yell at someone else's child for apparently no reason. It was a mess of a morning. And to top it all off, my usually (okay, sometimes) angelic children took this morning in particular to be, well, something other than angelic.

I will admit without shame that I went home and cried to my parents.

So the crèche business was over and done with (actually it wasn't - it appears that the horrible episode is turning into a saga) but I thought that surely that was it. That was my dose of unpredictability for the week and it would be smooth sailing from that point on.

No points for guessing whether I was right or wrong on this one.

On Wednesday I caught the world's worst stomach bug and was forced to go home from work early. I'll spare you the gory details but for a while I couldn't even keep water down. I spent Wednesday night not sleeping and Thursday home from work, trying to take tiny bites of food and make it stay down.

On top of feeling exhausted I was infuriated. It's infuriating to have to spend so much time and energy on providing your body with basic needs like food and water. I had no strength to go for a run and no presence of mind to write anything halfway decent. There went my consistent progress on two of my January goals. I do all the planning in the world only to be bowled over by a stomach bug.

UGH.

The weekend wasn't so bad. I made some progress on a few things I've been meaning to do and kept pressing on. I was determined not to let the last week keep me down. Crèche went better than last week but still not amazingly (remember it's now a saga) and I came home and gratefully crawled into bed to read Pride and Prejudice. I remembered to be thankful that I get to do that.

And then we get to today. Friends, both of the (major) things I had intended to do today - that I had written down to do - I have not been able to get done because of circumstances outside my control.

If I can be honest for a second I feel like God is being mean to me.

I know, however, that He is not.

He is teaching me. He is testing me. He is shaping me.

He's showing me it's time to let go of my control-freak ways.

I've been walking around for far too long thinking that the world can and should run on my time; that if something doesn't happen how I want it to or when I want it to some grand scheme has been thwarted.

And so God is graciously peering down from heaven and throwing spanners in all my works to show me that I AM NOT GOD and I need to give Him back the job of controlling the affairs of the universe.

Lord, Your plan is in the process of working. Your will, Your way, in Your time. 

Be patient with me and throw me a spanner when I need one.