It’s been raining hard here off and on for a couple of weeks.

Our driveway is gravel. Our road was gravel when we first moved here.  Most of the driveways in our area are gravel.

All this rain gives me a new appreciation for stability.

There is a lot of gravel in the road that shouldn’t be there.  There is a lot of gravel that’s washed down from everyone’s driveways.

Gravel is pretty heavy.  When you’re shoveling it you know that you’re moving something substantial.  It is hard to shovel gravel.

The kind of gravel we use on the roads and on our driveways is called “crusher run”.  It has a lot of fine gravel that compresses when you drive on it…forms a solid bed that way.

Crusher run is really hard to shovel.

But the water moves it all, little by little, until you wake up and you see that canyons have appeared where it once was smooth.

The water moves what it wants to move…and when it’s raining hard it wants to move our driveways down into the road.

I replaced the sway bar bushings on our minivan for maybe the 4th time since we’ve owned it the other day.  It’s not that I’m buying cheap bushings or doing the job wrong….it’s more a matter of it being a weird design that eats bushings like crazy.

I’m getting a lot better at doing a job that was kind of an “apprehension builder” the first time I did it.

Now it’s just an “irritation builder”.  It’s kind of a pain to do this job.

When I say pain, I mean literally a pain.

There is something horrible about trying to hold a 1/2 torque wrench about 6″ from your face while you back up the nut that can’t turn with a box end wrench…all the while, the gravel that I mentioned previously is digging into your back and skull even though you’re trying to stay on the square of used linoleum you lay down to protect yourself from the discomfort of laying on a bunch of sharp gravel. When you finish loosening that bolt….you have about 12 more just like it.

That’s just to take off the part that lets you do the rest of the job “easily”.  It’s hard to get to easy.

I was thinking this morning about people who get piercings or other “body augmentation”.  What a waste of money.

I carry divots all over my body for a week after I do some driveway mechanic-ing.  It’s not very artistic or cool…but I can definitely tell where I’ve been after I do a job on the cars.

It’s weird that something so substantial…something so heavy to move around if you’re shoveling or raking it…could act like it’s just sliding away when the heavy rains come.

It’s strange that something so solid could act like it’s just another part of liquid when the water gets ahold of it.

I don’t really understand a lot of spiritual things.  I guess that faith is what fills in the holes in my understanding.

I wonder if we aren’t kind of like a gravel driveway, though…moved by forces good and bad that we don’t understand or expect….moved little by little until we look behind us and see the ditches we never anticipated?

I know that I am moved…more and more… if I slow down long enough to stand in the “rain”.