I awoke at 4:03 AM to the police helicopter buzzing our home. Turns out there was a burglar a few streets over making his second attempt at forcible entry in ten days. Police cruisers patrolled the streets and the helicopter hovered over the neighborhood for half an hour.

The only one in our house who slept through the whole affair was the dog, which I don’t understand. I thought we had the dog for occasions such as this so our minds would be at ease and Dianne and I could sleep securely.

Standard routine at our house has the alarm clock sound at 4:45 AM, followed by one touch of the snooze. Then it is showers, breakfast, a few quiet moments, stretching, and a workout all in varying order depending on the day of the week and whether it is Di’s schedule or mine. The only critical variable is for the shower to follow the workout.

But this morning we both piled out with the alarm’s first declaration of morning. No sense lying in bed any longer, all except for the dog that is. She doesn’t pay any more attention to the morning alarm than she does to helicopters or burglars three streets over.

I stretched out to loosen up my cantankerous back and retreated to my chair in the TV room, threw a comforter over my lap, and opened to the third Proverb.

Even though I had spent the last hour of my sleep time listening for the ominous sounds of a burglar outside our house, my mind was primarily focused on yesterday. As the children’s book would describe it, it had been a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad day.

I had been impugned and slighted. My feelings were hurt rather profoundly—and not for the first time—by a colleague and friend in another city.

I sat for a moment or two with my Bible in my lap wondering why the unpleasant event of yesterday transpired and what I should do about it, but I was no closer to understanding it or knowing what to do now than I had been after I hung up the phone fifteen hours earlier. So, I looked down and began reading.

“Do not let kindness and truth leave you. Bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight” (3:3-6).

He will make my paths straight. Hmm. More about that next time….