Last week I discovered that I had only two weeks before my military ID card expired.<\/p>\n
It is always difficult to get this renewed. In this case, I didn’t have any weekdays off before the deadline. I called, and the nearest office didn’t have any appointments. “Nearest” was 45 minutes away, too. They said that they take walk-ins after 1:00, but I asked if I should go in an hour before, and she said that the day before they’d started turning people away at 11:30 in the morning. So I asked when they open and she said 6:40.<\/p>\n
The upcoming Friday, I had a meeting of children’s librarians in Arlington. (It is also 45 minutes away, but in the same general direction as the base with the ID card office.) I figured I’d try to get to the ID card office at 6:40 and bring a bag of books and plan to wait 5 or 6 hours if I had to. At least my workplace was already planning on having me gone in the morning, though I hated to miss the meeting. I asked to not be scheduled on the information desk until late in the afternoon, and planned to take as much leave as necessary.<\/p>\n
Well, I didn’t get to the office until 7:15. There was a 7:20 no-show — and I had my new ID card by 7:30!<\/p>\n
I was early to my meeting, and even had some time to sit and read before I went to it!<\/p>\n
What’s more, if I had arrived at 6:40, I would have been there when they had to call the police about a belligerent customer who got angry when they didn’t give him (a walk-in) priority over a person who was late to their appointment.<\/p>\n
I had prayed that there’d be an opening for me to take. And that I’d get to go to my meeting and not have to take leave. But I hardly dared hope it would really happen. And it was my own fault I hadn’t kept track of when my card expired.<\/p>\n
In short, it was total grace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week I discovered that I had only two weeks before my military ID card expired. It is always difficult to get this renewed. In this case, I didn’t have any weekdays off before the deadline. I called, and the nearest office didn’t have any appointments. “Nearest” was 45 minutes away, too. They said that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderblessings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderblessings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderblessings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderblessings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderblessings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderblessings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":795,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderblessings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions\/795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderblessings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderblessings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderblessings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}