Do I practice what I tweet? WARNING: DISTURBING IMAGES

A week or two before our family went on vacation I tweeted the two pearls of wisdom below.

“Pain in my life is not optional; misery is optional”

“Today is going to include disappointments, misunderstandings & frustrations. Expect them, ask God for grace, quit whining, & follow Jesus.”

I thought these tweets were pretty clever and I even got “retweeted” a few times (for those of you unfamiliar with the tweet universe, getting retweeted is kind of like the geek version of getting picked first for basketball in 6th grade recess).

We decided to go to NYC for vacation because the tenant living in our house completed her lease and we wanted to check on the house, and maybe spend a morning making sure everything was ready to show to new prospective tenants.

Well here’s a few highlights of our family vacation (and I use the words “family vacation” in the Chevy Chase movie series sense of the phrase).

• Car overheated in Maryland on the way NY.
• Traded money with a mechanic to fix the car.
• The car overheated 10 minutes after we left the mechanic
• Took it back and they did something mechanicy that “fixed the problem.”
• When we arrived at our home in NYC we realized that our ex-tenant did not leave the house “in the condition she received it.”
• Trash is kind of a big deal in NYC so I got an estimate from “Remove My Junk” who said they would haul away everything the tenant left for the LOW LOW PRICE of only $2,685 (of course I am listing the highest estimate I received to make my story more exciting).
• In addition to hiring people to help, violating several child labor laws and watching my wife work herself to exhaustion, I worked 15-17 hours every day to  get the house ready to rent.  I did take a break on Sunday to attend church (I thought I’d throw that in so I would look pastoral).
• Worked a deal with a “trash guy” and disposed of over 150 bags of trash and abandoned belongings.
• To have a better idea of how our ex-tenant left the house I’ve included a picture of a dead bird [WARNING: DISTURBING IMAGE] I found decaying in one of the rooms.
• The car overheated twice in Manhattan traffic affording us the opportunity to smile and wave at New Yorkers as we blocked traffic on Broadway with our truck decked out with FL license plates and a luggage carrier on top.
• Since the car only overheated in traffic (and our drive back to Panama City is all highway) we decided to try to drive it back to our mechanic at home (some would call this “counter intuitive” others would call it “a lapse in judgment” and still others “WHAT, ARE YOU AN IDIOT??!!!”).
• Car overheated 2 hours from NYC, we let it cool and began driving again (we repeated this process 3 more times until we got a hotel in Virginia for the night).
• Took the car to the Sears Auto Service Center who quickly proclaimed, “We aren’t going to touch your car. It’s leaking transmission fluid everywhere.”
• Took the car to Mr. Transmission who said it would take $366 to stop the transmission fluid from leaking.  After the $366 he can find out what is wrong with the transmission (he’s GUESSING $1,500-$3,000 to fix the transmission) and then he can try to find the overheating problem (he won’t even guess what the transmission would cost, but I’m guessing one of my kids won’t be able to go to college if I let him do it).
• They will call us when the parts come in and then we can make a decision of how we will proceed.

We will have to make a decision when Mr. Transmission calls.

I’ve found this week that it’s easier to tweet than live.  My question this vacation has been, how do I “expect problems, ask God for grace, quit whining, & follow Jesus” when I have the week like the one I just described?

I’ll let you know in my blog tomorrow (which I hope to post from Panama City rather than a hotel in Virginia).