disappointment

This is mostly for informational purposes for my family who reads my blog as I try to not bore anyone with too much of my day to day life. :-)

Just like about 90% of the US right now I've been having some financial stresses mostly in the last six months. I was really feeling the strain anyway and just barely keeping my head above water so to speak and I began having a lot of car trouble the last month or two. I found I needed new brake pads, three new tires and my serpentine belt is just about kaput when I started having some strange electrical trouble. My dear brothers took the alternator off and Haley ran it to Autozone for testing but found nothing wrong. I had finally broke down and bought two of the new tires (one kept going flat on me) so having no money and this being the really tight paycheck I was going to grit my teeth and pray my car through another month.

We were very busy (read stressed!) today, Mom had a shift, I had two, the girls worked this morning, Haley was busy all afternoon, we are trying to prepare the house for the exterminator to come on Monday and Micah's birthday is tomorrow so we were needing to do some prep for that. I had just made dinner and was making birthday cake when I got a call from Mom that she had hit something in the road and it made an awful clacking sound so she was on the shoulder. She tried to start it back up again and it wouldn't so I began trying to locate Dad or Haley who had the other functioning vehicles (the van has been out of commission since that fateful trip home from the rodeo in Marc) to meet her. While I was on the phone with Dad I got a voicemail from Mom. Whatever she hit had torn a hole in my gas tank and the entire contents emptied onto the shoulder. I suspect that was $20 worth of gas alone as I had only recently filled it up. :-P To be quite honest I shed a few tears. Having just bought the tires I really don't have the ability to pay for more repairs. Mom said she wasn't the only one who hit the mysterious object and that several people were on the shoulder with flat tires. We were grateful that having discovered it was the gas tank Mom had not been hurt when she tried to restart the car. A wrecker came and towed my poor little car to home up into the driveway alongside the van where it will sit until I have some money. I'm really afraid to find out how much it will cost. :( So I guess God is really teaching me right now what Bro Joe was talking about a few weeks ago--giving everything you've got and then trusting God to take care of the rest since we have no way to get the entire family anywhere (including church I am reminding Him :) ) until either the car or van is running again. It will be interesting to see what He does!