Discount Tire Frequent Flyer

Learning to become joyfully interruptible

With a rich irony not at all lost on me, this post is seven weeks late, because my weekly writing slots keep getting interrupted… So go the unrelenting lessons of life!

---

In my early postgrad years, my savings goals were usually limited to the price of the clothes I had my eye on at Anthropologie or plans for a weekend trip with my girlfriends. Once I got married and my husband, oh so patiently, taught me real, grown-up budgeting, we started joking that the things our saved dollars pay for aren’t typically a dream trip to the Caribbean or my next favorite outfit.

The joke has become more true, and less funny, over the past eleven years of marriage. While my six-year-old saves his tooth fairy money for a new LEGO set, our household's rainy day funds more often go to an unexpected medical need, a faulty appliance, or, at one point early in our marriage, two new ACLs for our dog.

The past several weeks have galvanized this unfunny truth through unavoidable, unplanned spending on a barrage of car expenses: first when we realized my tire treads were worn unevenly and I’d need a new set soon; then, when a rogue piece of metal caused a dramatic, rapid leak in my tire on the way home from school pickup (with both kids in tow and my husband en route to another city); again, when I got a “tire pressure sensor failure” alert on a Sunday evening; and once more, when we discovered a slow tire leak from a hidden nail.

On the bright side, I now know where the closest Discount Tire is located and can navigate there by heart! And we may not be planning a trip to Turks and Caicos, but my car is safely back on the road.

Where I’d be if I weren’t at Discount Tire, maybe?

As the friendly tire expert swiped my credit card after replacing all four tire pressure sensors on my week-old tires, and also patching the one with the nail, I asked if there were any perks for spending a certain amount there in a given month. If a Discount Tire Frequent Flyer program exists, this year, I’d be in it.

Disruptive as they’ve been, my recent weeks of repeated Discount Tire visits have pressed me to consider how my knee-jerk reactions to unplanned events are growing through this slow, steady stretching of life.

When my kids were littler, car time could be excruciating with a crying baby or a fussy toddler. I relied on Google Maps to get us where we needed to go, with the least friction possible. I have a vivid memory of taking a wrong turn onto Redbud Trail one afternoon with my screaming infant son, well past his limit, in the backseat. My error forced us into a long, slow line of cars, adding dozens of intolerable minutes to my ETA. I burst into spontaneous tears, so overwhelmed at the thought of the extra car time and with so little bandwidth to adapt to this unexpected change in my plans.

I shared that story shortly after it occurred with a wise friend who was a few years ahead of me. In her empathetic response, she encouraged me that motherhood, like perhaps nothing else in life, would teach me to be flexible, to be interruptible, and to receive my daily portion with joy. Since then, I have prayed that request what feels like hundreds of times: asking God to help me believe the words of Lamentations 3 and Psalm 16—that the Lord is my portion, that this is good news for me—and asking his help to receive whatever he has for me with peace and joy each day.

Since I began praying this way, the “growth opportunities” (a euphemism from my early public accounting days, when the demands of a project were particularly challenging) have flooded in. Truly countless situations have arisen to challenge my flexibility, my interruptibility, my adaptability, my willingness to receive disrupted plans:

The power has gone out just as I started prepping dinner to host a friend.

I left my VO2 Max test appointment still wearing the heart rate monitor and had to drive back across town to return it, obliterating the day’s optimized errand schedule.

A brief twenty-minute downpour perfectly overlapped with my daughter’s school pick-up window, and we all got drenched.

I went to bed early to catch up on sleep and found myself wide awake at 2 AM for no identifiable reason.

And, among innumerable other examples, I’ve become a frequent flyer at Discount Tire.

In this season of parenting two young kids, the days can run together while the months are flying by. I can’t slow down time, but I am trying to slow my own speed of life and make room to notice growth and progress, for myself and for my kids, which happens bit by bit. It certainly isn’t linear, but I can see it: bedtime was a battle every night for weeks in a row, and now, harder nights are becoming the exception. Our older child has matured beyond some of the discipline struggles that still plague our younger. I am enjoying cooking dinner in the evenings after years of feeling like constantly feeding these people was a dreaded responsibility.

And, somehow, I am not so characteristically, chronically tightly wound as I have been for many years before now.

It should go without saying that there are still plenty of ways my type A-ness is exposed. We have baskets and bins galore in our home, because I’m happiest with a place for everything, and everything in its place. I’m pretty big on bedtime routines. My calendar is filled with priorities and appointments and reminders to keep me organized. A hundred notes in my phone are a searchable brain dump for the things I don’t want to forget (kid-friendly options for future movie nights, packing lists for places we plan to visit again, upcoming dates for which we need to book babysitters). I am by no means always going with the flow here.

Yet planned and scheduled as I may intend to be, a few weeks ago, when my car alerted me to my sudden flat tire, with my husband boarding a plane and my kids buckled into carseats behind me, I shocked myself by… not panicking. I didn’t burst into tears or freak out. I told my kids what was happening and remained pretty calm. I called my husband, and then his dad, for help resolving it. And without the flooding overwhelm or immediate frustration, I was able to see the situation for what it was: an inconvenience, but not a crisis. A disruption, but not a day-ruiner. It was an adventure I would not have picked, certainly, but one we could definitely receive and roll with. It was unfortunate timing, but it wasn’t insurmountable.

It was our portion for the day.

With this joyfully-receiving-my-portion perspective, the tire scenario actually helped me give thanks for all the little ways I could see God’s provision even (and especially) when things didn’t go to plan: having supportive family members nearby; having kids who are growing to be flexible with changes of plans (again, they did not get this from me); the timing of the flat being on the way from school instead of on the way there, when I would have had a more pressing schedule; and much like my savings lessons from early in marriage, the un-fun budget plans in place that would let us solve my tire problem quickly.

Beyond protection and provision in the unplanned, these “interrupted” scenarios push me to consider what God might be doing, not just despite, but through the very circumstance that is perfectly poised to throw off my whole day. My father-in-law taught me how to change a tire in my own driveway; maybe that’s a skill I’ll need again soon in a far less convenient place? Maybe driving slowly home on my flat kept us safe from a dangerous collision. Maybe not replacing my tires for another week would have been even more hazardous. Or maybe the great work of those moments is not some miraculous sparing of other external possibilities, but rather the resolution of my internal desire for control, making them purposeful and particularly necessary for me.

Here lies the joy invitation to learn to receive my portion: not in explaining away the purpose of every disruption, but rather in having eyes to see—or at least believe in, when it remains invisible—a bigger picture that means something unexpected isn’t the same as something wasted. It’s making my plans to the best of my ability, then willingly releasing them when life “gets in the way” (which, I’m learning, is very much the rule and not the exception). For me, it’s remembering that it’s better in every way, less upsetting, and far more peaceful to open my hands to receive a portion that wasn’t on my proverbial bingo card, rather than white-knuckling to preserve my expectations and being overwhelmed when they still don’t hold up in the end.

I don’t enjoy having my plans disrupted, but I can have joy in all of these moments.

I have not arrived. Just last week, I let two nights of bedtime delays leading to overtired kids put me in a total funk, and I snapped at my husband about something inconsequential that I can’t even remember now. But I’m learning to see how so much—maybe all?—of life is destined for interruption. My joy, my peace, and my enjoyment of the people around me are greater when I’m open to receiving my portion in full.

I’m learning to pay attention to where and how I can be more joyfully interruptible, how much better life is when I am, and where I still have so much room to grow in receiving these daily disruptions.

In the meantime, you can look for me in line at Discount Tire.