A day like no other

 

I have a set of stairs leading up to my French doors, which look a bit like these, although a lot less solid.

    The actual stairs themselves were replaced a few years ago and revarnished more recently. However, for whatever reason, shortly after the repairs and maintenance, a few began to wobble and a few began to crack.

    Before continuing with this story, let's go back to the day before.

As usual, I woke up in the middle of the night, and after reading Psalm 91 and praying for my mom and my children, I sought a teaching to watch or listen to. I found a very interesting one on Time Management from a Kabbalistic point of view. Basically, the teacher was saying that every second we are alive is important.

    Before going ahead with this story, let's go back to last week.

We had a 36-hour internet cut. It turned out someone had tried to move their front yard fence poles onto municipal property and, in so doing, had dug up the fibre cables which supply the neighbourhood with access to the World Wide Web.

    When the connection was once again restored, I surveyed the past 36 hours and came to the conclusion that God wanted me to manage my time better and not let my household chores fall behind in favour of the online work I do. The loss of internet access for these hours had created for me a loss of income, which I can ill afford.

    I got down to doing daily chores and achieved a lot at home that I had "not had time for" due to my online teaching and prep for classes. I realised I needed to wake up earlier - maybe not go back to bed when I wake up at 3am. Just the thought of that makes me feel tired!

    Once the 36-hour test had passed, I was sure things were going to be good for another long while, but it was not to be.

    That was last week. This week, I watched the teaching on Time Management - something God had spoken to me about last week already - and this is the day that ensued:

    Things went well at first. I woke up, said all the blessings and prayers, did some household chores, and went to the shop for my 10% pensioner's discount.

    Upon my return home, carrying my two shopping bags, I greeted the landlord who was standing downstairs - he's never there at 10.30 in the morning! - and proceeded to climb my stairs.

    As I placed my foot on the third step from the bottom - one of the wobbly ones; the other wobbly one was third from the top! - the step came loose from its mooring, and I fell, screaming, to the grass and cement at the bottom. Even as I felt parts of my body hitting against various hard things, I was aware of HaShem holding me in His hands. Things could have been SO much worse!

    As I lay there in a strange and awkward position amidst my broken geraniums and pansies, with my shopping scattered all over the place and my glasses lying somewhere in the chaos, I found myself moaning and sobbing like a little girl, crying for her daddy.

    Truth be told, I had been asking for a while for the deck and stairs to be maintained. The landlord and his wife are lovely people. Perhaps they didn't understand the severity of the situation. This was one sure-fire way to get the job done. God's timing was perfect. The landlord had been an eyewitness to the step breaking and me falling. He was the one who had to scrape me off the cement. I am sure he was in shock. Him and his wife were very concerned about my well-being, bless them.

    As we speak, the builder is busy outside doing the necessary repairs. Baruch HaShem.

    After gathering my glasses and my far-flung food items, I made my shaky way upstairs and came to sit at the computer to log on for Shacharit. Only to discover the internet was down again!

    I could hardly believe it. I let the ISP know and spent the day waiting for it to be restored. The actual fibre provider just kept on giving generic responses. And, again, I was losing income!

    So I followed the set protocol and got busy with things at home. I was surprised at how much I had once again "not had the time" to do - things that should be done almost daily. I let all my affected students know that we would have to - once again! - move our lessons to next week. I was asking myself why God would allow me to lose all this income, two weeks in a row?

    Of course, I realised the issue was my time management issues.

I want to thank and appreciate all my students who have been patient with postponed classes for the last two weeks. I appreciate you and thank you for not giving up on me. These two consecutive outages have forced me to invest in a back-up system to ensure uninterrupted internet access - something I am in the process of putting in place.

    After the spate of thunder and lightning storms we've had recently, I invested in a power surge plug to storm-proof my little laptop. So now, literally, I can say: Come Storm or WiFi Blackout, I will still be able to teach! May the Name of Almighty God be praised for the way He orders our steps!

    I still find myself whimpering every now and again when I recall the trauma of the whole thing - and feel the sore bits hurt - but I am at peace, and I'm very grateful to my Father for the beautiful day He has given me today. I seek to be close to Him; that is my main goal in life. I love Him so much, and I thank Him for everything.

May we all learn to listen to His voice!