Our Plans to Become Bear Food - Foiled!

This past weekend, we planned to go north to do an overnight camping trip. (Neither of us has the stomach for more than one night of camping with three kids. Or with two kids. Or with one.)

About 30 minutes before heading out, DH and I were discussing how we ought to cook that night's dinner at the camp. Quoth I, "Let's check out their website to see if they have barbecues!" So I hopped on the campsite's website to see what amenities the sites had. While on the site, I happened to notice a tiny little blurb at the top of the screen: "Due to high fire danger, camp ground is now closed." 


Thanks for letting us know!!! 


 So DH got on the phone and discovered that, indeed, our campground was closed. He was told that it is the practice of the reservation system to refund the fees electronically and then give an automated call to the buyers to let them know of the closure (a call which we received, incidentally, three days later).

All of our last-minute measures to figure something else out for the day were fruitless, so we canceled our trip, stayed home, and made our dinner on the barbecue.

Bummer!!

But even so, DH and I discussed this - why did God obviously not want us to go on this camping trip? We had done our best, but our best had been cut off at every turn.

Sometimes you get answers. Sometimes you don't, this side of heaven. But in this case, the answers began to roll in rather quickly.

On Sunday morning, we learned that we were going to have to make several other trips in the next few weeks, making the money and time saved quite an advantage.

On Sunday evening, we learned that every single campground around the area we planned to camp had been closed due to multiple bear attacks, which are still ongoing.

And today, when I took the car out, it quit within ten minutes of home. With that plus the driving I've done this week, we would have had a breakdown about halfway to our camping trip.

To summarize:

If we had been able to go, we would have been spending money that would be needed elsewhere. Had we spent the money that was needed elsewhere and gone anyway, we would have broken down on the way. And if we hadn't broken down on the way, the bears would have eaten us in the end! 


Just kidding on that last part. (Maybe.)

But I just love it when God shows his hand so clearly and his reasons are so evident.

But most of the time he doesn't. Most of the time I have to take things on faith and trust that I will understand later, either in this life (often the case) or in heaven (also often the case, as my new favorite poem expresses so beautifully).

My faith to trust in hard matters is.... not that awesome. Abysmal, actually. My husband has the gift of rock-like faith, but mine is not so great when the going gets tough.

Take pregnancy, for instance. All it takes is one whiff of nausea to send me into a tailspin of faith-questioning panic. It happened this week, as a matter of fact. I'm still experiencing postpartum nausea (happens every time), and one night this week I went to bed nauseated... and woke up in the middle of a night to attend to a crying child - still nauseated. My mindset at the time was something like, "Must be pregnant. Going to die. God, why have you forsaken me?" etc. etc. etc.

Faith is a definite issue for me.

But in minor things like the above, it is truly fun to watch God at work.