A Few Key Thoughts

It has been a busy weekend. On Saturday we drove down to Penn Yan for a family picnic on Keuka Lake. It's always great to reconnect with cousins and I look forward to this gathering every year. Of course Uncle Chuck's crazy bicycles came out as well as stilts and a bean bag toss game. It was a nice day and all our children were there which is pretty amazing.

Yesterday morning Jim left to make his way back to Minnesota. He was headed for Chicago yesterday and will arrive in St Paul sometime this afternoon. We had him home for seven weeks and would have been happy to keep him but he has others wondering when he is coming home on the other end.

Ahh... the key thoughts...

After church yesterday I took Ben, Hannah, and a friend to Oswego for a week at Bible camp. It is a little over an hour's drive east of here. After finally getting them registered in the dining hall and going into the camp store to take care of business there, we headed back to the van to drop their things off at the cabins. That is when I discovered my car keys were not in my jeans pockets. I returned to the store to see if I had left them on the counter. Nope. We checked the van; not in my purse, not under the seat, not between the seats... I went back to the dining hall. They were not on the floor, not on the tables, not behind the curtain with the nurse. They were not in the Ladies' room. No one had seen them and they were nowhere to be seen. Back to the van... Ask the kids to check their pockets again... check the ground... ask more people... go back to the camp store... check the van again... dump my purse... check my pockets... I was really beginning to feel altogether foolish. Each person I asked, asked me the same the same questions, "Where have you been?" "Did you leave them (here or there)?" I hadn't been anywhere since I'd last had them and had retraced my steps so many times that I couldn't even remember where I had been anymore. I must have walked back and forth for almost an hour, talked to James on the phone, had a dozen people looking, and still no keys. James had prayed with me on the phone and I didn't feel any sense of panic, but still my keys were not appearing and we had no extra set at home, just a single key on a rather big key chain which was now gone. "What did they look like?" (Another question...) Large black key with the remote lock control, a green Coleman lantern key chain and some small stars. They had vanished. Some friends from from our old church offered to take me home and I decided I should take them up on the offer. The camp leaders promised to call when the keys showed up,... if they showed up.

By the time I reached home we had missed the evening church service. James and I decided to go for a walk in the orchard. We walked a long way and had a nice time together. Back home a little after 9 pm the phone rang. It was Sherri (from camp) on the other end. My keys had been located. As I had begun to suspect while wandering the grounds between my van and the dining hall, they were no longer at camp in Oswego but in the bottom of a woman's purse in Syracuse. She has a similar key chain but had no idea how she ended up with the keys. Not only that but she has no plans to return to camp this week and is leaving for the mission field today. (All this is too funny!)

God is good and He knows all things. My keys will go back to camp with the camp director, Sherri's husband, Clay, (who happens to live in Syracuse and is home packing to move) and sometime this week I will get my van back. In the meantime, although I have no children in my home and Jim is gone back to Minnesota, I will be unable to go anywhere without help from a friend or family member. That's okay. I have plenty to do here at home and trust that God has a plan in this whole experience. I know that He is working in my life, teaching me, stretching me, and growing me. A few years ago I would have been beside myself at losing the keys and angry that I am trapped here at home, but He is teaching me to trust that He has a plan and purpose higher than my own. I went to sleep knowing my keys will be returned and not having to worry about what to do. I have to smile a little bit though because God wasn't finished stretching me when I went to bed last night. I woke up to a terrible thunder storm with pouring rain. Almost all storms travel east and the windows in my van were rolled all the way down... I'm hoping someone really threw a cover over it like they said they would. Oh well, nothing I can do about it from here...