A Truly...'Eventful' Trip!

Last week was family vacation week for the Davidsons. We had the opportunity to drive up to northern Minnesota with Tracy's sister and her family. Let me try to paint a quick picture for you. 2 families (The Davidson's and the Hogrefe's), 4 adults, 5 kids (all between 2 and 8 years old), 1 Van, 4 car seats, looked liked 30+ pieces of luggage, 2 portable DVD players, 5 grocery bags full of candy and snacks, 2 grocery bags full of Dollar Store games, toys and books, 500+ pints of Mountain Dew (or so it seemed), 22 hours of driving (one way), and 1 lofty goal of driving straight thru and stopping only for gas and bathrooms. You want to talk about a recipe for disaster. I think all four of us adults later admitted that we were all totally dreading this trip. At least the driving part of it. But to our surprise it went amazingly smooth...the driving part anyway. Shockingly there was not one single melt down by any of the kids (maybe a minor melt down froma couple of the adults). They did incredibly well. Even once we got there things went quite well...for a while! We had never seen the cabin we were to stay in but were pleasantly surprised when we got there. I had the chance to go out fishing one of the first mornings I was there and caught my first ever walleye and northern. My frist walleye was a nice 13-14 inch one and then the second was about a 23 incher and weighed about 4.5 pounds. I was quite pleased. The first few days went quite smooth....and then!!! Wednesday Landon decided to give us some excitement and go swan diving into a boulder. After 5 hours in the Emergency Room and 15 stitches in his forhead, things settled back down...for a while. The next day I got one of the scares of my life when I received a text message telling me by brother had been in a serious accident while on duty with the Sheriff's department. After many phone calls, prayers, and a few tears, I found out that he was alright...pretty banged up, but alright. God had answered our prayers (by the way....thanks to all of you who were praying for him during that time). At this point my nerves were pretty well shot! Fortunately God was gracious enough to carry us thru the rest of the trip with no major crisis to deal with. He actually blessed us with a great day of fun on the 4th of July in the tiny little town of Big Falls, Minnesota.

After it was all said and done, and after I had gotten my family home safely, I had some time to reflect. It hit me how short and fleeting this life is. I want to live my life and I want to encourage my family to live their lives in a way that soaks up every precious moment we have together. I don't want to take one second of that for granted. It also made me think about God and His Son Jesus. It reminded me of the sacrifice that He made giving up His Son, whom I know He looked at even more fondly than I look at my family... yet He sent Him anyway! WOW! That speaks volumes to me about how much He loves me. It makes me want my kids to know that same love even more! What an amazing God we serve!!!!