Monday, July 20, 2015

Tender Mercies

I am currently serving as a Sunday School teacher for some of the youth in my church (13-14 year olds) and I have recently been harping on them about keeping a journal.  We've talked about the importance of remembering Christ not just on Sunday but every day.  One way to do that is to write in a journal daily and reflect upon the tender mercies that God grants you each day.  It's easy to overlook these tender mercies unless we sit and really take time to think about them.  I have been a little hypocritical because I haven't been doing the very thing that I keep telling them is so important to do.  If I don't even do it, how can I expect them to?  So here I've decided to keep track of some of the blessings in my life that would so easily be forgotten or go unnoticed unless I had written them down.  Maybe taking a few moments to write the small things will even get me to write the longer stories while I'm at it.  Since I'm on here now I feel like writing the whole cousin camp story but I'm going to skip that momentarily, especially since no photos have been down loaded yet, and get to that later.

1. Today Brooklyn remembered that there was a fireside that she wanted to go to at church.  When it was over, she called for a ride home, but nobody answered the phone.  I was talking to my dad because it was his 70th birthday and I didn't recognize her number on caller ID so I ignored it.  (It's a fairly new phone.)  She called all 4 cell phones twice, and the home home phone 3 times, and nobody answered even though we were all home.  After the conversation I was having with my dad was interrupted for the 3rd time,  I realized who that might be beeping in, and felt bad for keeping her waiting at the church for so long.  I quickly sent John off to go pick her up.  Because the 4 Runner decided to stop working today and the Sequoia was hooked up to a trailer, John hopped into the Mini Cooper and went to the church which is a 7 minute ride there and back.  Some time within those 14 minutes of being gone,  the rope that has held our canoe up on the ceiling of the garage over our Mini Cooper for 6 years, snapped, and the canoe came crashing down. The timing couldn't have been more perfect.  The impact of the heavy canoe would have crushed our little Mini that we have grown to adore.  


2. We had cousin camp last weekend and John and I prepared a 3 day get away for 30 family members. We brought up all the food ourselves.  On the 2nd day we realized we were completely out of forks and almost out of spoons and there were no stores around for miles.  This was a problem because our next 2 meals were going to be spaghetti and oatmeal.  I kept waiting for some sort of tender mercy to get us out of the pickle we were in.  I just knew I'd miraculously find utensils in our trailer that we had brought with us.  I looked and there were none.  I looked through all the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen of the lodge we were staying in, twice over, and was disappointed when I found nothing. We toyed with the idea of eating it with our hands and making it a fun memory but with no showers and 15+ kids it was really a terrible option.  We decided to go dumpster diving for previous forks we had used as a last resort.  Gross.  I know.  But we were desperate.  John's brother Sterling was sympathetic to our dilemma and volunteered willingly to do the deed.  I felt terrible that he had to do this but he took it like a man.  I got back to the lodge minutes before him and he walked in with 3 bags of brand new plastic utensils.  I still am unclear about where he found them.  But he said he saw a little hut with a flag on it and wondered if maybe he could get them there.  I have no idea where he found it or how he thought to go there but there was my (and his, since he got out of going through the trash) tender mercy that I'd been waiting for.


3. We took our dog with us during cousin camp and brought him on a 4 mile round trip hike to a really neat water fall.  He's had trouble with his knees in the past and the fact that he could walk this hike was a tender mercy in itself.  The kids all like to hold the leash and they got ahead of me a ways so that I couldn't see them.  When I rounded the corner I saw him in the creek below with a man that we didn't know.  Captain, water dog that he is, had gotten away from the cousin who had been holding him and ran down to the creek.  Going in was one thing but getting back up on those slippery rocks with those imperfect knees was another.  There happened to be a bystander there who had such a tender heart for animals that he worked in an animal shelter. He jumped into the creek after him, soaking his pants in the process and helped him back out.  


4. The weather was absolutely beautiful for cousin camp.  


5. Because Bryton has had to miss work (at the golf course) for various reasons, he wanted to come  separate to the lodge, which was about an hour from our house, in the 4Runner.  He got up there with no problems and then he took Sydney and his cousin Morgan to our regional youth dance in Laramie the next night.  Around 11:00 we started to get worried because we expected them back by 10:30.  We had no way to reach them because there was no cell service where we were.  John got up out of bed to go looking for them just as we saw, with great relief, headlights coming down the hill toward the lodge, much faster than we would have condoned.  The next day, we returned home long enough to unload the trailer, get ready for church and have lunch with Brandon and April (John's siblings) and their families.  Since the Sequoia was hooked up to the trailer and the Mini was too small to accomodate us, we decided to squeeze into the 4Runner and take it to church.  We hadn't even made it out of our neighborhood when the clutch went kaput and stopped working.  It made it all the way to Curt Gowdy in Wyoming, to the regional dance in Laramie and back, and all the way home and then it was done.  Thank you, 4Runner, for waiting to get Bryton home safely before you gave out. And also, thank you for giving out so our little Mini could be protected. 

6.  John's brother Brandon just recently lost his job.  Which sucks really, really, really bad.  The tender mercy here is that just before cousin camp, John's dad went into the hospital because he was having heart issues.  He's never been to the hospital in the 18 years that I've known him.  Since Brandon came out for cousin camp and doesn't need to go back for work, he's able to stay with John's parents for a week to help out as they go through this difficult bump in the road.


7. Lastly, I just wanted to give a shout out to Sydney for following a prompting and providing a tender mercy for us while we were on our waterfall hike. One of the cool things about the hike was that some of us got to ride in a canoe for part of it.  It came as a relief especially to some of the younger kids on the way back.  The group that was ahead got to the canoes first and paddled back to the cars leaving behind just one for a few of us to take back. As the rest of us trudged on, we spotted Sydney in a canoe coming toward us by herself.  We waved her over and we loaded the canoe up with young, weary hikers.  She even gave up her own spot and jogged back to the car without complaining.  When we got back we found out that the group she had been with had thought she was crazy for even trying to go back out and find us.  They had returned to the lodge without her.  Kudos to her for following a prompting and providing relief to her cousins. 


I want to point out that I didn't even think of most of these things until after I decided to write tonight. So many things would have gone unnoticed if I hadn't taken the time to sit and ponder.  Yes, things definitely go wrong in our lives.  The canoe came crashing down, our dog almost drown, our car broke down, we didn't bring enough utensils, Brandon lost his job, and Sydney went canoeing by herself. But it would be short sighted to notice these things and stop there.  I picture angels all around us busting their backs to make our lives just a little easier.  Things go wrong, but much more often, they go right.  We just need to take a moment each day out of our distracted lives to notice and thank God for all of life's little miracles.