Time Flies...

 

 

 

 

This memory is only a year old, an yet if feels like many years since our last domestic family vacation. It dawned on me this week that 12 months ago exactly we were driving home from a fantastic and much needed family trip when John received a phone call from his friend and colleague Chuck. It was at that time and on that drive that I knew our lives were going to change; again. Listening to John speak with Chuck and pondering on our time in Salt Lake I had that dreaded sense that we were going to be saying goodbye again. Good bye to our wonderful home, to friends we'd grown to love, and to the nearness and accessability of our extended family.

Driving through that desert as John listended and spoke in turn on his phone I felt the landscape before me was appropriate. The vast desert of blank earth. A clean canvas. Perhaps uninviting but also unpredictable. And I do o.k. with unpredictable.

12 months, selling a house, living in a foreign land, buying a house, and now learning how to paint the clean canvas of the life before our family here in Dallas. Unpredictable it certainly has been; with life taking a turn in the form of an adventure to Africa, and then an adventure learning to love the suburbs of Dallas. Even more change than I had anticipated in the moments of that phone call 12 months ago. I wonder if I've dealt adequately with that unpredictable part...Have grown and deepened as a person and a mother? Have I helped my fellowman-even when I've felt I needed a little help myself? Have I taught my children to appreciate the blessings of the past and look forward to the blessings yet to come? Not sure. But, I think in the last 12 months I've come to feel a greater appreciation for my family, my faith, my culture, and the amazing interconnection I have with other cultures not like my own. I'm thankful for the last 12 months-and for the 12 months before them, and the 12 even before that too.