timely dinner guests

I was so excited for our new friends to come over for dinner. I had looked forward to it all week. I will admit that I was a bit nervous. I so admire people who have dinner parties, and entertain frequently, and with relative ease.

These were some of those people.

I assure you, I am not one of those people.

I set the table with some of my vintage tablecloths and part of my pitcher collection filled with cut flowers from the yard. I thought the blue hydrangeas gave a comfortable cottage feel to the dinning room. I was feeling good about how prepared I was.

Soon after that, things began to spiral downward. My watch stopped, and I thought it was twenty minutes earlier than it was. That meant I was really twenty minutes behind schedule, but bless my little heart, I didn't yet know that.

"They're heeeee ire!" the girls both sang, as they ran down the hall announcing the arrival of our first time guests.

THAT is the moment when I realised I was behind!

I quickly breaded the chicken, and in haste, forgot the Parmesan cheese. I popped it into the 400 degree heat, that was now making the kitchen feel like it was also 400 degrees! The kids dispersed to all ends of the house, and the sweet parents came to the kitchen to chat with Michael and I. It was then that smoke began to poor out of the oven. Something that had earlier dripped on the bottom, was now burning. Michael helped me quickly move the chicken to the other oven, and now the oven fans were going full blazes so we could hardly hear ourselves think! So much for conversation.

Twenty five minutes was what the recipe had said for the chicken to be done. I should have known that wasn't long enough before I even started. I took it out twice to check if it was still pink, and added almost 30 minutes to the cooking time. Meanwhile, I was choking on the smoke. The green beans were done long before the chicken, and sat waiting like unwanted left-overs getting cold as we all suffered asphyxiation from the now smoke filled room.

I frantically transferred the potato salad to a prettier bowl, something that should have been done in that twenty minutes that were "lost", as sweat rolled down the small of my back. The ice maker was spitting chips on the floor as I tried to provide my guests with drink choices and instructions.

Finally we sat down to eat!

The dinner conversation was refreshing with this precious family as they choked down raw chicken, and the compliments on my pitiful excuse for a meal were reluctantly accepted. We laughed and shared, joked and learned. They are a very special bunch, and I marveled at God's providence once again. Timely dinner guests,

His timing is always perfect, even when mine is not!