An Excerpt…
“When my brother and I were very small, there was a family from the church that acted sort of like grandparents to us. The family encouraged my parents to begin taking family vacations. My parents had very little time and even less money when we were small, but at the urging of that family, we began a tradition of family vacations. Like many pastors’ families, I think, they were borrowed vacations- borrowed Suburbans, borrowed cabins and cottages, borrowed time from the church. And they were great. We have thousands of memories of family time together, thanks to the generosity of many church families.
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When the husband and father of the family who first urged us toward vacations died far too young, we sat with his family at his funeral and watched clip after clip of family vacation videos. There were hundreds of photographs and bits of video, funny things and sweet things. You could see the texture of their family through these photographs, and what those images revealed was intimacy and deep love, between a husband and a wife, between parents and children, between grandparents and grandchildren.
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When the funeral service was finished, our family stood off to the side for a few minutes before greeting the extended family and friends. My dad had cried a little bit as he spoke at the service, eulogizing his dear friend, but as we stood together, he began to cry in earnest, the chokes and coughs of a man who seldom finds himself so overcome by tears and unable to stop them. He pulled us into a circle, stretching his arms around us.
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“We’ve got to be like that,” he choked. ”We’ve got to be like them. We’ve got to take the time right now because there’s nothing more important than this.”
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…Vacations are more than vacations… Vacations are the act of grabbing minutes and hours and days with both hands, stealing against the inevitability of time. There will be a day when our family as we know it will no longer exist, and I want to know in that moment that I wasn’t at the office or doing the dishes when I could have been walking on the dock with my dad, when I could have been drinking tea and eating ginger cookies on the porch with my mom. I don’t want to be building my bank account or my abs or my dream house when I could be dancing with Aaron at the beach bar on New Year’s Eve, when I could be making crackers and cheese for dinner because we were on the boat till way after the shops closed. sunburnt and sandy and windblowb, and happier there and together than anywhere else with anyone else.
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…Families can go either way, and I take no credit for the way we’ve gone. I accept it like a gift or a winning lottery ticket, and I hold that ticket in my hand tightly, and I take every chance I can get to be with them, for an afternoon, for a weekend, for a vacation, and every moment feels like being given one more winning ticket.”
—-Shauna Niequist- Cold Tangerines
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Hope this makes you as grateful as it made me.
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Merry Christmas
