TO anticipate or NOT to anticipate?

Cottage Bible study last night and it was wonderful, as always. It would be a little nicer to have maybe a little more Bible and a little less socializing, but LOL I still enjoy it anyway. I mean, I really enjoy the socializing a LOT, but would love to spend more time talking about the Bible and about God. I have a feeling that time may be coming, however, when we really get into the meat of the new Bible study we’re going to be beginning… It’s Not About Me by Max Lucado. We watched the introductory DVD last night and I’m looking forward to really beginning the lessons.

The dinner was good, chilli, salad, etc. I baked corn bread. I had never made it from scratch before and it turned out very well. All topped off by delicious mint brownies for dessert.

We stayed until after 11pm and had a great time. Tomorrow my daughter and I go back for a spa party with “the girls.” I’m really looking forward to it. Also tomorrow is my debut as a bell-ringer 😉 I joined the hand bell choir a few weeks ago and tomorrow I’ll play in church for the first time. I must be nuts. At least I only have a few rings to do. 😉 I hope I don’t mess up but one of the other ringers told me that people don’t usually notice even if you do mess up so I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. It’ll probably be fun. The only bad thing is I really love the sound of the bells and you can’t enjoy it as much if you’re standing there playing them as you do when you’re out in the congregation just listening to them, but we’ll see.

My husband went to Bible study with me last night and I think he did have a good time. He hung with the guys and worked on one of the computers as they socialized. I know that he knows that it enhanced my experience to have him there. I’m proud of him because he’s handsome and funny and smart so it’s nice to have him with me. I have a good time even without him, but it’s better with him. I know they were glad to see him there with me as well. We’ll see how it all turns out. I don’t want him to come along if it’s a trial for him, but if he finds it enjoyable, what a nice thing for us to do together a couple of times a month. Our son didn’t mind having a Friday night to kick back and have the house to himself. But we’ll see how it all plays out. I don’t want to get my hopes up only to be disappointed most Friday Bible study nights and be on my own. It’s better to just count on going myself and be pleasantly surprised when he joins me.

The problem I found with that this past Friday was that I kept wanting to enjoy the anticipation of this fun Friday night ahead of me, but whenever I started day dreaming about what fun we were going to have on Friday night (which we ultimately did) I had to stop myself just in case he would end up being too late from work to go. If I anticipated it too much and got too excited about the evening, if he ended up getting caught up at work or ended up really not wanting to go, the disappointment would have been really tough had I allowed myself to spend the day looking forward to his being at Bible study that night. BUT if I don’t allow myself to look forward to it, then I miss out on a large component of the pleasure it could afford me, if you get what I mean. So I’m sort of caught between a rock and a hard place. I COULD sit here and imagine, with pleasure, the coming weeks of cottage Bible study and how much fun it’s going to be going there with my husband because he said he thinks he’s going to go, but then if he doesn’t really come through on it, I’m going to be hurt and disappointed and upset. But if he DOES really come through on it, the anticipation will have been about 35% of the overall pleasure of the experience. (I like to look forward to things.) Sometimes it isn’t even his fault, really, that he doesn’t come through for me. It might be work that stands in the way, but it still hurts and I don’t want to be in that position, so I guess I have to weigh it all and figure out what to do from here. And I guess I need to find out if he really is going to come to Bible study or if it’s an IF kind of thing so I know whether I should allow myself to anticipate it or not. That would probably be the wisest way to handle all this.

Well, I’m going to go try to make yogurt in my new yogurt maker. I managed to somehow misplace the instruction manual but I found some lose instructions online so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that these will work. Wish me luck!