God's little Gifts

August 11, 2011

So today my family along with a friend left to head to Arkansas to our favorite traditional lake trip we have taken every single summer since before I was even born. Every trip has its own little something that happens which always makes for a good story to tell when we return whether its we got rained on and our tents didn’t hold up so everything got wet or one time we woke up in the morning and our boat wasn’t there… that one was exciting. Anyways, this morning I woke up like every other morning of departure and got my stuff together and helped load up the boat. It was pouring all morning, any other time I would be a little glum over the fact that were about to spend the weekend at the lake and its raining… I mean really? But Oklahoma has been in a drought and all I could think about was praising the Lord for sending the rain so THANK YOU JESUS! Everything was going great so far, David and Lauren slept a lot of the way, Josh was in the back listening to music, Mom was driving while Dad was reading papers or on the phone, and Macy was sprawled out on top of me while I was playing words with friends :) We were nearing a town called Springdale which is about an hour from our destination (Holiday Island) and my mom’s car notifies her that one of her tires is low so we pulled off and sure enough you can hear the air leaking out… so we took a detour to a local automotive place to see if they could fix it. They couldn’t but they put the spare on for us for no charge. My dad was certainly thankful for that. The rest of the journey was going fine and we pull into Holiday Island where we were checking into to get the keys to the house and some dude who was running caught my dad’s attention and told him it sounded like air was coming out of one of the boat trailer’s tires. Sure enough there was so we had to change that and found a rock stuck in the tire. Really… a rock? My dad said that just two days before he had to get a new tire on the trailer so that is 3 tires in 3 days… I think that might be a record. My sister and I were talking in the car about how badly we hoped this rain stopped because all we wanted was sunny days to be able to get tan lol!

Okay so now I will get to the point to me telling you all about our boring disastrous car ride. I was reading in 1 Kings 18, when Elijah was praying for rain and he kept sending his servant to check over and over! As I was reading this I started thinking about a lot of different areas in my life that this was really going hand in hand with but then my sister came out and we went for a run so as sad as this is I didn’t think much more of it.

After one lap around Lauren and I decided to walk another one and just talk and enjoy the amazing evening. We came to this one spot that looked out onto a cove, the moon was shining so bright and there was fog off into the mountainy hills. It was simply stunning. It was a true gift from God. I thought about it and realized that the entire day we had been sitting complaining about the fact that it was raining and that it took us six hours to get there instead of five and we were going to have to spend more money on tire repairs… etc. and because we were so focused on all the things that weren’t going OUR way, we were missing opportunities to stop and pray and to thank God for what was going HIS way. We didn’t have to pay the tire people, we all arrived safely, as soon as we put the boat in to go out before dinner the sun came out and the skies cleared, we had an extra hour of hanging out with each other in the car, and I got to see one of the most amazing sights I have seen all summer. Just because we pray Lord help our trip go smoothly right before we leave, and then we have two flat tires and a whole bunch of rain, doesn’t mean God didn’t bless us with little gifts in every situation. I remembered how Elijah continued to pray and continued to send his servant to check for rain. He didn’t pray once then it didn’t come so he started complaining. He persevered!

Well that is my story for the day! I know I haven’t posted much on here but tonight I just really felt like I needed to share that.

So tomorrow if something doesn’t go the way you want planned it or want it to, don’t worry and don’t get caught up in the situation. Instead take a minute and pray and ask God to open your eyes to see the wonderful gifts he has given you!

Goodnight! J

Lissa