We went to Disney World this past week, and going there during a low period in your life can be very emotional in some ways. My kids are getting older and making their own mistakes and having their own successes. My life is in a totally different place than it was 3 years ago when we went.
The first day of the trip we went to ride Soarin’ Around the World at Epcot. This was the first (and most meaningful) of my emotional responses to a theme park ride. After all, it’s just a ride right? I had no idea what this ride was. I don’t know if people working there even know what it really is. Now I know it’s confirmation for me. It’s confirmation that God can literally do anything. He can. I sat in that ride expecting nothing. When the ride began, we were soaring (literally) around places that only a God of mercy could create. How could He create so much beauty in a world where none of us deserve it? How could we take for granted what we don’t deserve anyway? This world is a blip, but we can make it a beautiful blip. I cried through that ride. Y’all pray for me.
The rest of the trip was a lot of the same. I just enjoyed it. The bookend to an emotional year for me was on the car ride home. Things weren’t perfect because long distance traveling never is. One part was close though. I asked Noah to let me see the ocean. We haven’t been in a couple years to the beach, and last time I was standing on a beach was under totally different circumstances. It feels like a lifetime ago. I highly suggest going to a nearly empty beach at every point in your life. The appreciation is different every time.
Noah humored me by driving totally out of the way to get to a beach. We messed up and let the beach highway get away from us, so we passed beach house after beach house, each of them blocking our view. I was stretching my neck trying to see just a glimpse of the ocean through trees and shrubs and over garages. It seemed like this struggle went on forever. We were just trying to see it once; just one time to take it in before heading home.
It hit me that this is what it’s like trying to get to Heaven. We make mistakes along the way that keeps us from seeing that for which we are seeking. We only hope to see His face. Mistake after mistake; wrong turn after wrong turn; the feeling of being discouraged and thinking this might never happen so we may as well give up; all of that put together gave me the absolute certainty that God was speaking to me through this experience. At the end of miles and miles of sneak peeks, we finally found a parking lot and walked over the dunes to see the vastness of the ocean before us. It was there I felt the Holy Spirit move again in my heart. Watching two of my kids running to the ocean with nothing holding them back was the most reassuring moment as a mother because I saw this as their road to Heaven. God is telling me to stay the course for my family, and we will all be running headlong into the gates of Heaven one day. Afterall, what else really matters?
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