save me and I will be saved,
for you are the one I praise." Jeremiah 17:14
I will never forget our family's trip a few years ago to and from Florida. It was a long trip- we decided to drive the entire distance from our home here in Wisconsin to Orlando. Andy's baby brother was getting married there, so we needed to go, and we decided to turn it into a two-week vacation. As with any road trip, tempers were short, and the little things would be annoying in the car. With very young children in the backseat demanding much attention in between bouts of car-sickness, it was a journey to remember.
The first day of our return trip home we will certainly never forget. We were all exhausted from the week of wedding festivities, and we really were ready to be home. Except that we had a four-day journey ahead of us. We were driving north, knowing that we were driving into hazardous weather. We crossed the Florida line into Georgia, and were just a few hours shy of our destination for the day when we hit the torrential rain. Our already short fuses got even shorter. Zander hadn't been eating very much on this trip and he was crabby and tired of french fries and grapes. Abigail was tired of throwing up every time she got in the car, and I think Andy and I had had enough of each other. We had to slow way down in the rain, and the slower we drove, the more annoyed I got. We were hours from our hotel already, slowing it down would take twice as long! Other drivers just made me angry when they would do something strange, and all Andy would do was look at me and I would snap at him. It was not a pleasant car to be riding in.
Then we pulled off the highway to make a turn, and a huge tractor-trailer was at the stop sign at the bottom of the ramp. It didn't move. It was blocking the road, had it's turn signal on, but didn't move. What the...? We were literally stuck. All we could do was wait for him to move out of the way, and about five minutes later he did just that. I still remember glaring at that truck as we passed him by. And then not five minutes down the road, we saw the flashing lights of the ambulances and police cars...and the downed trees, power lines, and the swatch of damage left by the tornado that had just passed through. It was intense. The air was still charged with the energy from the tornado, and 16 month old Zander quickly became affected by it and threw up all over me. After that, our drive was very quiet for awhile as Andy and I both reflected to ourselves that if that tractor trailer had not been there, we could have found ourselves in the middle of a funnel cloud. We knew that God had been looking out for us, and it really changed our demeanor for the rest of the trip home.
We stopped early that night, and the next three days of travel were the most pleasant we'd every had. There was no bickering, no fighting, no short fuses with our children. We became instantly patient with them and with each other. We looked at things with a whole new light, because we knew that God had placed that truck in our path to save us from death. The petty things we found troublesome before were gone and seemed so trivial in light of what we'd witnessed.
I think that sometimes we get too caught up in the petty. Even now, thinking about that trip, I am overwhelmed, because that wasn't the only time God was evident on our journey. More than once we experienced his hand of protection, and it really stayed with us. Sometimes we just let those little things fester and bother us instead of looking at the big picture. Especially in our relationships with people. Think about it. How often do we think of a friend or family member and think about their little quirks or idiosyncrasies that bother us? When we get together with those people we brace ourselves for the little things that annoy us instead of simply embracing that person in love and looking at the big picture. Within our marriages we let the little things annoy us, and sometimes those petty annoyances can build up and cause friction. Instead, we need to let those things go and see just how trivial they really are.
"But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose confidence is in him.
8 He will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit." Jeremiah 17:7,8
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