Penwell's Law of Travel and Why Churches Need to Plan for Failure
Boy, howdy, do I get cranky on the first day of vacation!
For months I look forward to the time off. I do all that pre-vacation planning, thinking about how long we’ll drive each day, where we’ll stop to eat, the kind of hotel that can accommodate five people. I like the planning.
The packing, though? I don’t like the packing. In particular, I don’t like the “getting-out-of-the-house” part. It always takes exactly two hours longer to leave than I planned. There invariably seems to be one more thing that, if it gets left behind, will mean certain calamity—medicine, power cords, the five year-old’s nebulizer.
And I tend to take out my frustrations on my family. For the first hour in the car I’m a sullen jerk. I don’t want to be a jerk.Nobody wants me to be a jerk. But there I am privately (or if you ask my family, not so privately) seething about the fact that now we’re two hours behind my meticulously thought out schedule.
Except it’s not that meticulously thought out, is it? I never seem to factor in the two extra hours that, no matter how much we’ve packed and prepared the night before, it takes to get on the road. So, either because of my poor planning or my bad memory (or more likely, some combination of the two) my family has to start its time together with a Dad who blames everybody but himself for the late start and the bad mood he’s in.
