Yesterday was an emotional roller coaster. I finished day 2 of college orientation with Kid #3 and found, to our relief, his scholarships and grants will be sufficient to cover his tuition and fees. Now to find the funds for his photography equipment and other expenses...

We took Red Canyon Road down from the campus. This is the Colorado equivalent of one of those horrific highways in the mountains of Colombia or Peru. As we maneuvered down (it's only wide enough for one vehicle at a time), a white VW Jetta appeared behind us and followed us down to the valley floor. While I waited for safe entry onto the highway, the driver of the Jetta laid on the horn to "encourage" me to pull out. When he whipped around us, Kid #3 noted the bumper sticker from our home church proudly displayed in the impatient driver's window... Yeah.

The moral of the story? Unless you plan to behave perfectly behind the wheel from now until the second coming of Jesus, please do NOT put a bumper sticker on your car advertising your church. I've got enough water under my spiritual bridge to be able to say to myself, "That dude is either having an emergency, a really bad day, or his wife put that sticker in the window," and move on, but someone else might be inclined to apply that one driver's impatience and/or rudeness, to everyone associated with the church. Just a thought.


Second lesson (this would be the insult to injury part): I stopped at the bank to open a new account, as we've yet to transfer everything to our new locale. I gave the 12-year-old (she might have been pushing 20) account manager my information. She turns to me a few minutes later and says, "I'm so sorry, you have to have a credit score of 600 or better to open an account at this bank, and yours (pointing to a glaring figure on a printout) is only 595. I'm afraid I can't open an account for you."

What happened to our credit score, you ask? The same thing that's happened to hundreds of thousands of other people... job loss + underwater mortgage + lousy real estate market.

You know those ocean waves that catch you by surprise and slap you upside the back of the head and leave you choking and gasping for air? This was a figurative version. I managed to get out of the building and into the privacy of my car before I started bawling. I'll be 42 a month from today, I just moved back home to my parents' property (boomerang child) and I can't open a flipping checking account at the SAME bank where I opened my FIRST checking account when I was 16 years old.

It was one of those FAIL moments.

Anyway, as He tends to do in these sorts of embarrassing situations, this morning the Lord reminded me gently that He is my provider, not the bank, not creditscore-dot-com, or the world system of economics and finance. It's my credit score with HIM that matters. And it looks like this...

"Having cancelled and blotted out and wiped away the handwriting of the note (bond) with its legal decrees and demands which was in force and stood against us (hostile to us). This [note with its regulations, decrees, and demands] He set aside and cleared completely out of our way by nailing it to [His] cross."

(Colossians 2:14 AMP)