Week of Work

This week I paid the price for being gone on family vacation.  I know it always happens this way, but it is never a joy to return.  A vacation is supposed to refresh you and make you ready to work hard again, but it just serves to remind me that family is most important, and I wish I could spend all my time doing that instead of work each day.

Each day I would think I will get done on time, or a bit early so I could leave and get home.  I spent many days on vacation doing work and meeting so I knew I had time to leave a bit early.  But each day things would happen, situations that have been pushed off had to be addressed, and I ended up staying late.  Even on Friday I had some visitors from China in, and I had planned to end at 4:00.  I thought in my mind then if everyone is still talking we will still end by 4:30, and I could drop them off then head home a bit early.  But the discussions did not end until 5:30, then I had to drop them off, return to the office and gather my things.  All in all a long week for work but the family time the weeks prior were worth it.

The evenings were spent trying to figure out, clean, and then disassemble, clean and repair the horrific stench in the car.  The meat we brought home from Grandma and Grandpa leaked out of the freezer bags and into the carpet.  Then when we stopped and unloaded it began to rot.  And it was not long before it was unbearable.  Just gross, at it's core.  At first we wiped, cleaned, sprayed, and I even used bleach in the rear gaskets to get all we could find.  But it remained.  I then realized it was under one trim piece, so off it came (and as I write this I can still smell the stench in my mind as I did this) and we found a pool underneath.  Great, we found it!  We cleaned that and sprayed, then used an ozone treatment in the car.  Next morning......augh!  Stench remains.  So I had to take out the rear seat, the carpet underneath it and all of it had to come out, be cleaned, and the frame underneath sterilized.  It turned out to be the carpet piece and that took work to remove the offending bacteria and then use an enzyme to actual destroy the source of it all.  After all that each evening we finally can be in the car and it is fine.

The lesson in it all is that you have to clean the very source, the very core if you want to make things change.  Just like our lives, we have to clean the inner most part of us, our thoughts, our desires, out intents before we can truly change and become who He wants us to be.  Changing just the appearance will leave us stinking the next morning.  We have to change inside.

Love you forever, it's a great time to be alive.

Dad

3 John 1:4