Repairing roads

Why bother about sleeping? Underneath the window, the Council has come to dig up and repair a road that seemed okay to me less than three hours ago.

The first vehicle was fascinating. It sucked up the tarmac as though it were a starving beast, spewing out the road surface into the truck immediately ahead (and successfully dodging a tree in the process).

Then a second contraption, this time with a large bucket affair to the fore, scraped up any tarmac that had missed its massive predecessor.

Four men, each wearing a luminous yellow jacket marked ‘safety inspector’, performed their inspections. Were they the dreaded Health and Safety Executive? I have no idea, but their eventual departure to the side of the road made it possible for the pneumatic drills to begin working.

The sequence continued with a motorised vacuum cleaner winding backwards and forwards, ahead of a truck laden with rolls of blue-something…

…and then the process began all over again as a second strip of tarmac was removed from the previously intact and innocuous road.

The whole business would be fascinating were it not already quite late at night.

Why is it that some people’s work is never convenient to others? There would be complaints were the road to be closed and resurfaced during the day. There are different complaints when it happens at night. There are some battles that are never won even though they must be fought.

It is all rather like the chiselling away that God does. He does not always mould me into the person he wants me to be at a time that is convenient to my own schedule. He works according to his own timetable, which seems interminable on some occasions and then rather too rapid at others. The trouble is that he is dealing with eternity, which is rather different from our concepts, which are limited to time.

Yet, just as surely as the noisy contraptions outside my window will have, presumably, laid a new road surface by tomorrow morning, even at a measure of cost to those of us who are trapped in its immediate vicinity, so God will work steadily and unendingly until I have become exactly who he knew me to be from all eternity. He does not sleep either!

God bless,
Sr. Janet