Obedience

A combination of my health issues and mum and dad’s accident has meant that I have become nervous about travelling. It takes real effort for me to get into a car and go anywhere, particularly if it is further than to town and back. My husband also gets nervous about travelling on unfamiliar roads.

There was a time when we had a phone call from our daughter. It was important for my husband to attend his granddaughter’s formal. It meant five hours travelling on roads that are busy and unfamiliar. We both prayed hard about this. In order to help motivate me to get into the car I asked our daughter to see if she could organise a quick book function at short notice. I even tried to arrange something myself. There is nothing quite like the possibility of selling some books to get me out of my chair. Our son, who is young, confident and knew the roads better than ourselves offered to see if he could get time off work. The answer turned out to be no. So we had to plan to do this alone. Yikes! Can’t we get out of this! The answer again was NO! We had promised and promises must be kept. More praying happened in amongst trying to get the nerves to settle.

God we will obey but boy this is putting us out of our comfort zone. Then the blessings started to come in. First one, we received a phone call to say things had changed at work and he was able to have the time off and could help with the driving. Thank you Lord. This was really more doable. However, the book function was a no go.

Have you noticed that with each blessing there comes a temptation? Well the temptation for me was to pull out, just let the husband and son do the trip. God’s quiet voice could be heard; “You said you would go as well”

“But I’m not really needed, I could just stay home, I get so nervous.”

“You said you would go”

“Yes, I said I would go and I need to be obedient to the promise I made, Ok I must go.” So I started to pack and we started out still not sure how things would go but I had packed a box of books just in case.

We made our first “pit stop” in a town about two hours travelling from home. While we were waiting for our food I was talking to the staff and they asked about how my book was going. When I told them it was slow they indicated that sometime they should actually buy a copy and asked about what was the best means of getting a copy was as their particular town didn’t have a bookshop at all. I went into my usual discourse of internet sites that carried my book and then I woke up. I have copies in the car. I could sell a copy right there and then. Blessing number two, a book was sold with promises of purchasing more on future trips.

We made it safely to the formal and here was blessing number three, the look on my granddaughter’s face while she danced with her grandfather was worth more than any number of book sales.

On the way home we again stopped at the store where we had sold the book. As a matter of course I asked if they had had a change to start reading my book yet. Again God is good, He reinforced an important thing for me and that was that my format was good, busy people do not have time to sit down and read a whole book without getting lost. (Sorry to all my Christian Romance Writer friends out there).

So next time God asks me to go outside my comfort zone, I pray that I will remember this trip and obey a little more readily.

“If ye love me, keep my commandments.” John 14:15