All in a day’s work

How does God keep track of everyone?

I had one of those days last Thursday when I wondered if I was autistic. Or agoraphobic. Or terminally unable to get anything done. I ended up drifting around doing bits of this and that. There were people to contact but somehow it could wait till tomorrow. Shopping to get, but hey, there were eggs in the fridge and science may prove tomorrow that mouldy bread’s good for you. The house needed cleaning and the washing basket was filling up. The builder was coming later to fix a leak in the roof, so if I was going to go out it had better be now.

The weather was good and I normally hate to see sunshine and not be out in it, but I ended up staying in, writing a song and making cake.

Eventually, when the cake was almost cool, it occurred to me to phone an old lady whose husband was ill in hospital and see if she’d like some. She hadn’t been eating cake while he was at home, because he wasn’t well enough to eat it and she’d said, ‘You can’t eat cake on your own.’

Today I persuaded her that I’m living proof that you can, and she changed her mind and said she would like some, so I took it round।

The builder came, the roof was fixed, I texted a friend who had spent her day journeying to a favourite uncle’s funeral and was just home, a couple of people phoned, and I had supper and went to my church home-group, where everyone seemed a bit sleepy and unfocused and we didn’t get round to praying till the evening was over.

I hadn’t done much with the day, hadn’t gone anywhere apart from up the road, but a number of other people’s days were intertwined. My friend, at the funeral, had joined her day with family members who rarely came together and didn’t see their lives as connected with each other’s, most of the time.

The builder and his mate had spent their day going to several jobs where work needed finishing off, and were due at one more after our house.

And the old lady would later receive a phone call saying her husband was dying, and she would call a good friend from church who would drive her to the hospital and help her into a wheelchair from the car to her husband’s bedside, where she would talk to him about happier times, not sure if he could hear her. And then she would go home, and wait. And the phone call would come before midnight to say he had died.

How does God keep track of all those lives – all those people’s days lived out, alone or entwined or alongside - when just one ordinary day holds so many people’s days, and one person’s life, whether successful, traumatic or uneventful, touches so many other lives?