Friday Five - Late

Today's Friday Five was a little bit later than usual, and asks us to consider our tardy tendencies. This is an interesting thing for me to think about because, on the one hand, I'm very grateful for the "lateness" of this today since I was tied up most of today so I feel like I'm still kind of on top of things and get to play. I am usually quite thankful for the times when other people are running late. On the other hand, I HATE to be late. In fact, I hate to be anything less than five minutes early. Whenever I think about being late, I always think about my little friend from Alice in Wonderland, because everything I do feels like "a very important date!"

1. Church - Although I am rarely "technically" late, I am almost always later than I want to be. I generally like to have at least 10 minutes of quiet alone time to get myself situated before others start showing up. That rarely happens, especially when my darling husband is doing the driving, but it's been a good learning experience for me!

2. Home - I'm having a hard time thinking of a specific instances when I was late for something at home, but I am a lot less anxious about this than anything else. I guess it goes to my ideas about hospitality and being a good hostess because I want to make people as comfortable as I can. At least when it comes to someone being at my house I can tell them how to get inside, even if I'm not there so they aren't having to sit in the car and wait (although the front porch swing isn't the worst place to be, either!)

3. Work - Tutoring has been a new and good learning experience for me to change the way I think about being "late" because the attitude is kind of "whenever you get here!" The notion of grace in relationship to punctuality has been hard for me to receive but very welcome!

4. Friends - I'm sure I've stood up my friends a time or two, but I can't think of any specific instances. I will tell on my hubby and the fact that he was late for our first date! At least he called!

5. Other - Any time I have any sort of appointment, I make it a point to be early. Recently, my counselor moved to a new office where the front doors are locked from the outside after "normal" business hours. My first appointment at the new building was scheduled for 6 pm so I had instructions to call my counselor when I arrived so he could walk down to let me in. Thanks to traffic, I arrived only 3 minutes before my scheduled appointment time (rather than my usual 10) and got a somewhat frantic phone call from my counselor because he was worried about me since I was "less early than normal!"