DWITS #9 – Chapter 6, A Passionate Mission for Our Lives as a Family
Below, my late husband, Cary, and I in our camping clothes at a pristine lake in British Columbia, Canada on August 7, 1996.
Every Friday afternoon I blog about my recently published “grief guidebook”, Death, Where is Thy Sting? Recovery From the Loss of Our Loved Ones and Preparation for Our Own Final Days. On it’s debut weekend late-August 2020, my fourth non-fiction book hit #1 New Release in multiple categories on Amazon, including “Christian Inspiration”. After you read this week’s chapter excerpt below, I hope you’ll purchase one for yourself and one for a friend at this link:
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What was God trying to reveal to us? Did He have something bigger and even better for us as a family? What should we do immediately? What should we plan for next month, next year, next decade, and beyond?
These were just some of the big questions Cary and I discussed as we drove north from Colorado through Wyoming, into Montana, then Canada, turning west toward Alaska, then north to above the Arctic Circle. We listened to music and audio books (on cassette tapes – remember those?), but mostly we talked and talked and talked. Thank goodness my talkative husband was back in his groove! It was one of the best months of our lives, despite the six flat tires, our motor home roof leaking in pouring rain, a horribly painful burn from hot bacon grease — which I suffered on my right hand — and our well-used motor home dubbed, “Old Moe”, needing case after case of motor oil!
At each campground, we all had a blast as we fished, ate campfire stews, sang songs, enjoyed telling stories, and gladly consumed more s’mores than would be recommended by the Surgeon General! A few catastrophes happened along the way, but we found that we could just shrug off most of the bad stuff because “the worst” had already happened and we were once again thriving.
Cary and I decided we:
- always had a mutual desire to adopt kids
- enjoyed raising children and were good at it
- had a fun-loving, happy, stable marriage
- had enough room and resources to enlarge our family
- trusted God for everything and wanted to serve Him in a big way
At a Canadian campground named Strawberry Flats, we enjoyed a picnic complete with motor home oven-baked cake to celebrate our oldest daughter’s 5th birthday. We took time during grace before the meal to pray, specifically asking God to show us what He had as a new vision for our family. That was on August 7, 1996. The next day in Denver, unbeknownst to us at the time, a beautiful baby boy was brought into this world, and seven years later, he would become our son through adoption. Looking back, that was an immediate and significant answer to prayer which the Lord was unfolding, years before He would reveal it to us.
(Chapter continues in book.)
