Skip to main content

Our Florida Trip: The really good stuff

In part one, I described the Disney and beach aspects of our trip, which were planned. But the most interesting reading could be a recount of the other two parts of our vacation.

3. In 1986, I lost an uncle, and my young cousins had lost a dad. Michel, the young widow who had 3 little kids to raise, plus one on the way, moved from Texas to Florida, where she was from. She eventually remarried, but we had lost touch. I had recently found my cousin Heather on Facebook, and we had agreed that we should all meet while we were there.

This was, by far, the best part of the trip. Heather has gone from a little 4-yr-old that I barely remembered into a great young woman with kids of her own.  Michel, my aunt, brought her husband, who is battling a newly-discovered physical ailment which threatens to make Michel a widow for a second time. She and I had a great, in-depth discussion about the past, the effects the loss of their father had on the kids as they grew up, and a summary of what God is doing in the lives of these family members of mine who I do not know. It was powerful. It finally got interrupted by--this should come as no surprise--a jellyfish sting, this time on the leg of my little 6-yr-old cousin.

This day, where I reconnected with family I barely knew existed, made the entire trip to Florida worth it. 

 4. When we returned, we found that the weather back in Texas had not been kind to us. We took the shuttle from the airport terminal to the remote (cheap) parking, where we discovered our minivan, full of dimples from the rather large hail that had fallen on it.; the hail also cracked the windshield and broke the taillight.

But it gets better. When we got home, we looked in the back yard, where the wind had, during the same storm, flipped our 14-foot trampoline and set it, upside-down, on the wood fence, hanging as much over our neighbor's yard as our own. It ended up taking 5 men the next day to get it down and put it back into place.

I should emphasize that we have a lot to be thankful for regarding this storm. While we had a cracked windshield, several cars had lost their entire windshields. While we had a bent trampoline, some neighbors had lost large, old trees or entire fences. We got off somewhat easy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Saying goodbye to one set of twins, and hello to another

"It's been ten whole years already? Wow! Hard to believe." Many a father will say something like that while shaking his head in disbelief, when his oldest approaches the 10th birthday. It's a milestone, not just for the kid, but for the parents. It's a head-shaker because I am reminded that on that day, 10 years ago, my life changed forever. In some ways, it has passed very quickly.  In other ways, it seems like it's been every bit of ten years. There are two distinct things, though, about the ten-year anniversary of my dadhood. The first is that I became a father of not one, but two little bundles of joy that Tuesday morning. Abby was born at 8:48, followed by her brother Jacob at 8:50. The second is that their birth marked some rare joy in the midst of the darkest day in our nation's history.  As my wife was in labor, a nurse came in and told us that an airplane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York. I turned on the labor room...
6 comments
Read more

Embarrassing video clip--John Cougar

I recently stumbled across some Youtube gold: a live performance by John Mellencamp when he was Johnny Cougar. He appears to be have been about 23, and he's singing "Ain't even Done With The Night", in front of a fairly unresponsive crowd with Bobby Bare (?!) in the front seat. Cougar/Mellencamp is dressed in a nerdy sweater and generally bears no resemblance to the singer as we knew him just 5 years later. He looks a lot more like Potsie from Happy Days than the guy who sang "Pink Houses". Certainly, there is no way to watch this and make a connection to the guy whose song "This is Our Country" beat us to death by overuse in pickup truck commercials. But the real entertainment value from this clip comes from the guys behind Cougar. In hot-pink tuxedos, there are 5 Pips-like backup dancers/singers who don't sing, but clap their hands real well. They essentially spend the entire song performing cheerleader dance routines not unlike those ...
14 comments
Read more

Is U2 a Christian band?

Ephesians 2:10 "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them" U2's new CD comes out this week, and it brings up that old discussion among Christians about whether u2 is a Christian band or not. Scripture tells us that all of creation speaks to the glory of God. Mainstream Christians have no problem acknowledging that mountains, flowers, and waterfalls glorify God without actually speaking His name. But we are mistaken if we forget that humans can do the same, simply by walking in their calling. If a country singer, for example, is truly walking in his calling, he can continue to sing about the pain caused by adultery, for example, and it glorifies God every bit as much as biblical tale of David and Bathsheba, which carries the same message about adultery. If God has created you to be a story-teller (and singers are story-tellers), then be a story-teller, and you will glorify the one who cr...
26 comments
Read more