This morning was one of those mornings. Nothing went well at home after the boys left for school and I felt bogged down by minutiae. Folding seemingly endless laundry, preparing for a teacher-training class tonight, mopping up from a bloody nose one of my sons had on the kitchen and bathroom floors, hauling in a huge bag of dog food from the back of the van, losing a piece of writing I had spent hours on, making sure I had paid for my sons’ summer camps, realizing we didn’t have phone service because we had forgotten to pay the bill, seeing one son had left a book on the couch that he was supposed to bring to school and on and on. I was irritable. I was self-involved. I really just wanted this part of the day to be over.
Then Christ intervened. A little after 12 noon, I pulled out of the driveway to drop my son’s book off at school. My mind filled with my own to-do list, I turned on the radio, barely listening as I turned a corner to head downtown. The sight before me woke me up. In the humid summer air, an elderly man was wheeling an even older man down the street. I thought: these are the faces of Christ, breaking into my life. And suddenly, I became aware of the song that was playing.
It was the Moody Blues’ song: Tuesday Afternoon. “Tuesday afternoon, I’m just beginning to see, now I’m on my way. It doesn’t matter to me, chasing the clouds away.”