Email: Jessie Jennette

Friends,

My trailer’s topography shows a slight dip in the floor as it runs along my mini-fridge and under my kitchen table. Therefore, laws dictate that any large influx of water will collect there and form a puddle, which I have fondly named “the lake.” The lake has occurred twice this week due to excessive rains and winds and an undetectable leak somewhere around the upper bunk window.

In an inspired Mr. Fix-it moment, I made sure the bunk windows were closed properly and resealed them both to prevent the leak. Somehow, whether it’s the will of the storms that blow through or the spitefulness of my trailer that will only run out of propane in the middle of an abnormally chilly night, the problem found its way back under my kitchen table the following morning. When I walked drowsily through the trailer and stepped in the lake with my socks on, I frowned and said out loud to no one, “Well, that’s disappointing.”

It’s like today. Oversights and mistakes occur when a team comes in at an inconvenient time. Two groups—one staying in Fish Camp in Luling, the other staying with us here at Olive Tree—came at a time when many of the worksites were at a stand-still, waiting on late inspections to be passed. We were lucky enough to relocate to a different site that was in desperate need of work when there were so many willing workers available. Unfortunately, none of the worksite coordinators were able to stay and train those who had never hung drywall before, leaving yours truly to give the sheet-rocking seminar.

If you picture a corporate executive in a business suit that gets blindfolded, spun around ten times, and given a tail to pin on the donkey, it doesn’t differ much from the workday that followed that seminar. People were running into each other, female firefighters from New York and doctors and accountants from California collided. Between the 16 of us, we managed to hang four sheets of drywall in three hours. Thank goodness they were Christians. Without grace, we wouldn’t have survived to work another day. I didn’t begrudge the Olive Tree guys when they told me they were going out to dinner that night. It was quite a challenging first day for them.

Nothing goes according to plan. This is one of the things I like least about life. The only dependable thing about life is that it’s undependable, or something like that. What other choice to we have but to accept the hand we’ve been dealt? Normally, my response to this sort of disappointing turn of events was to read them as a sign of the sort of terrible things that will happen if I stay on whatever path I’m on. And typically, I would cease whatever noble action I was taking to avoid repeating the experience. In other words, I’d take the rough day as a personal failure and console myself by saying, “Well, I was obviously not meant to do that.”

What’s noteworthy here is that I didn’t do that today. I had a different response. Where I usually say, “I wasn’t meant to be doing this,” I said, “I’ll bet I could do this better. Give me another chance, and I think I could do this better.” What does that mean?

I don’t know.

But it made me feel closer to God.

Love always,

The wet-footed Jessie