Further complications

I’m sitting in the darkened boat, Secret, having just turned out my headlamp. We’ve just discovered that our friend’s dinghy has disappeared. The thing is, he’s not really a friend—he’s more of an acquaintance, a regular at the restaurant where I work. He found out about our boat, about our need to moor it someplace, and he had a mooring he hadn’t used in a while so he’s been letting us stay there. He talked to the harbormaster for us and everything. The only condition? That we take care of his beat-up navy-blue dinghy, attached to his mooring.

And now it’s gone. Do you know how much dinghies cost? About $2000. A third of what we paid for our entire sailboat. $2000 we don’t have. Karl’s out there right now, rowing around the harbor in the dark looking for it. It’s more or less hopeless, though—it was really windy last night, the whole reason the dinghy’s gone. And the reason we weren’t here when it disappeared. I was exhausted last night after working eleven hours at the restaurant, and Karl had had a rough day (he got our jib up, finally, with Ralph, which should have been a cause for celebration), and it was windy, so we decided to just crash as his mom’s place.

We shouldn’t have, of course. We were being lazy. And we should have reinforced Fred’s dinghy lines, just in case. But we didn’t. I feel so angry, and frustrated, and maligned by fate, exactly the way I did when my purse was stolen in Michigan. Except my purse wasn’t stolen. I left it in a Taco Bell in Berrien Springs, and the kind owner mailed it back to me, minus the $100 cash that had been in it, lost somewhere along the way.

I want to ask, why me? I know I shouldn’t, I know these things happen to everyone, and that ninety percent of them are my fault anyway, but still: why me? Why can’t I catch a break? Every time I start feeling like we make forward progress on the boat, we get socked in the gut again. How am I going to tell Fred? What are we going to do? How can we afford to replace a dinghy?

I can’t do anything now but pray. My grandmother’s prayers worked on my purse, but I feel like I’m asking God too much now. I don’t deserve more mercy. Karl thinks we shouldn’t pray about these things anyway, that they’re below God’s level of concern. I too agree in some ways. I feel guilty asking God to return my poor little lost dinghy when people are dying of starvation. How dare I? But God has to care, right? If he cares about every sparrow that falls?