This weekend I am in a friend’s wedding. I have been working on my Matron of Honor
speech and I am pretty pleased with it.
While working through all that, my mind flashed back to one of my
favorite all time stories from my marriage.
As it is not part of the speech, I want to share an excerpt from my
journal 6 years ago. Not, to clarify, I
rarely journal, so for this to be part of my history it must have been a
momentous occasion.
8-20-07
So
this weekend was absolutely terrible, but it makes for a great story. It was our anniversary weekend and we
decided to go camping. Well… it is
Friday night and we get to the amp site and we get into our big bag that has
all our food in it. It also has our
lighter fluid in it and it leaked!
Almost all our food tastes like lighter fluid. So I pitched the tent (downhill) and we get ready for bed. We have all 3 dogs with us (*at this time
it was 2 large breed Mutts and a Yorkie) and we get into bed and the dogs
are all over us. This is the first time
they have ever been allowed to sleep with us.
In the morning the
dogs wake me up around 5:00 am. I took
them outside and brought them back into the tent. About an hour later the dogs start pushing on the tent. They then break through the tent. The of course run away. Spike (the Yorkie), came back but the
2 big dogs are gone.
We
go chasing them. We don’t find them, so
we come back to the tent and change into hiking clothes (it is about 6:15
am). We walk off the path and through a
bunch of weeds. We still don’t find the
dogs and go back to the tent and decide to lie back down. While lying down, I said, “it feels like I
have bugs all over me.” To which my
loving husband replied, “it is all in your head”.
I am exhausted and
fall asleep for about 1 hour and then we decide to go searching for the dogs
again. We stay on the path but drive
over to a different trail. It is a
small and stupid trail so we get in the car to find another one. I life up my pant leg to find a couple
hundred TICKS about the size of a period ( . ) all over my legs. I tell my husband that I want to go home and
shower – NOW.
In
the meantime our realtor calls and wants to show our house at 11:30. We get the message at 10:15 and said she
could show it. We race home the hour
drive and have 15 minutes for both of us to shower before 11:30. The couple shows up at 11:20 so we are
running around frantically truing to shower. (After which the couple that looked made an offer, 100K LESS than
asking price- so we didn’t accept!) The
shower doesn’t take the ticks off.
We
got back to the campsite and start searching each other for ticks. My husband makes a fire and we cook hotdogs
without buns because the lighter fluid has leaked in through the plastic making
EVERYTHING have a terrible chemical smell and taste. I start to give Spike a hair cut and my husband goes to search
for the two big dogs. IT STARTS TO
POUR!!!! We all run into the tent
(which we had lied in while covered in ticks) and I fall sleep for 20 minutes
after we get settled. When I woke,
Spike was outside the tent running around, my husband and our truck are
GONE. I was so mad. I start getting ready to leave and pack up
the inside of the tent. My husband says
that we can’t leave without the dogs (after he shows back up).
So
we can’t leave because our big dogs aren’t back, we have no food because the
lighter fluid leaked and we are both in bad moods. I run to the store to get some food. While I am gone, the 2 dogs have magically appeared. We sat down to eat this sandwiches that I
bought at the gas station, it is beautiful all around and I say, “this is nice,
we can stay tonight after all”- STUPID!!!!
At 9:00 or around there, we head to
bed. By 11:30, I can’t sleep. I wake my husband up and inform him that we
are going home. He isn’t all too
excited or happy with me right now. He
takes the flashlight and loads up the truck while I pack the tent in total
darkness (because we are so smart and only brought one flashlight!). As we are leaving I told my husband, “I hope
I remembered my keys.”
We
got home and we bathed the dogs (who were also covered in ticks) and we
showered again too. In the morning, I
am looking for my keys and I can’t find them anywhere! We unpack the tent and shake it around. We don’t hear my keys! Devastated, I drive the full hour back to
the campsite and search there. When I
can’t find them, I call home and go to the ranger station. THEY don’t have my keys either! I call home again and he has my keys… They HAD been in the tent the entire time…
I look back on this story from our 4th anniversary,
and laugh. So often, we are in terrible
situations and we can’t see the humor or good in them at the time but the trial
then becomes a favorite memory.
Zephaniah 3:17 “The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty
to save. He will take great delight in
you, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.”
God takes our bad and changes it into good. He can take the terrible situation you are
in and SAVE you and make it a great memory.
He will take delight in YOU.
Maybe your story is one that is going to stay with someone forever and
change his or her lives. Every day is a
testimony!
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