(Pics from last year's Oregon trip)
We spent almost the entire day at the new house but never managed to see much of each other. The boys were out on the back half of the acre most of the day either digging for treasure, shooting at ant hills with the BB gun, or chasing each other with water guns. James worked on pulling out the old sump pump from the basement and getting a new water softener and water heater from someone on Craigslist while I did the only thing I'm comfortable with in buying a fixer-upper... clean, and played gopher for James when he was at Lowe's and needed me to measure the pipe sticking up out of the sewage ejector pump and get the model number off the corroded thing. I plugged my nose and did my best. Ugh. I can't imagine working in the sewage business. Yuck!
Bailey, our black lab, wore herself out chasing a squirrel and sniffing for cottontail bunnies.
By the time we got home all my normal Saturday energies were spent, but I haven't even begun to do the normal stuff that needs to get done on a Saturday around the house we're still living in. I have a lot to do this week if I'm going to head to Oregon on the 8th. Monday, after work, I take my physical and do all the HR stuff with Phoenix Baptist hospital. I start orientation on June 24th. Tuesday evening we have the end-of-season baseball party at a laser tag place. Wednesday is my last day at my school nurse job and I get to pick up a friend at the airport. Thursday and Friday will be preparing to leave Saturday for the long drive to Redding, CA to stay with my sister.
I look forward to these trips to Nor Cal and Oregon every year! But I think my boys enjoy it even more. They're yearly calendar seems to revolve around this trip. They mention it throughout the school year with longing. And as we get to summer, daily they ask, "When are we leaving for our trip to Oregon?" They love the early morning wake-up the day we start out on our road-trip. They anticipate it. They know good times are comin'!
It's like that as a Christian. Our calendar is built around the celebration of Christ. And life is a pilgrimage and we move through our full days, change of addresses and daily tasks longing for those times when we get to come together and revel in the promises, and tell the Old, Old Story, and rejoice in the gift of Christ, and love one another and Him together, and anticipate the day of the consummation of our longing.
A song for pilgrims ascending to Jerusalem. A psalm of David. I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go to the house of the LORD." -Psalm 122:1
And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. -Romans 8:24
Quieted,
Sheila
