Not all Doom and Gloom*

I wanted to let y'all know: this blog isn't going to be all doom and gloom. You just caught me during a bad week. :)

Life is a mishmash of happy and sad. One of my favorite movies ever contains the line, "Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion" and that's pretty much smackdab where I'm sitting most of the time. Life's rough. But it's also glorious.

My summer vacation almost always includes a nice, lengthy stay at the Oregon Coast. I center my entire year around this time at the beach--as soon as we leave one year, I'm planning for the next. My entire family goes, and we rent a house that's on the beach and just relax and beachcomb and eat crab and drink wine and find sand in awkward places. And we LAUGH. This year's trip has been abruptly cancelled. Rough. Roughroughroughroughrough. It ticked me off. Because when I went to go make my OWN reservations for a place on the beach: nothing was available. So I spent about a day feeling sorry for myself because my vacation had been taken away from me.

But you know what? For the first time ever, it means the family I'm directly responsible for creating will go on a vacation without aunts and uncles and grandparents in tow. We can go where we want. Do what we want. Eat what we want.

And one of the best things? We're going to introduce our girls to the wonders of Lutheran Outdoor Ministry, by spending the 4th of July weekend up at Camp Lutherhaven with some good friends of ours. Lutherhaven is intrinsically wound around my understanding of my call to ministry. If I had a spiritual epiphany in my early years, odds are good it happened at Lutherhaven. I'm SO excited to get to share this with my girls. Plus? We're tent camping. I'm not sure how this is going to work with the whole potty training/peeing at night in a dark outhouse over a big, dark hole thing, but perhaps we'll just get a bucket and a lid and call it the nighttime potty.

And, the four of us have reservations at the beach after Christmas. So I'll still get my time in at the beach, during the better beach-combing season.

All this blather is to say: as crap as life seems sometimes, it's not all bad. Sometimes, in the midst of some of the worst things, God comes and says, "Hey, kiddo. I want to show you something new."


*Alternate title "Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining...Eventually"