Hidden joys

     One of these days I will learn my lesson.  Even after years and years of my feeble attempts to try and do what I think is the smart move only to have it blow up in my face, I continue to learn life's lessons the hard way!  My last post was a couple weeks ago and if you recall it referred to one of these life's lessons when I chose not to listen to Kelli's logical idea of leaving Seattle early which ended with us stuck on I-90 for 2 1/2 hours.  This week I had a meeting to attend over in Missoula on Tuesday and since Kelli didn't have to work until Wednesday she came with me.  We went over on Sunday and spent a couple days with Dan and Donna in their snow infested part of the country.  The whole area had been hit with a pretty heavy winter storm, leaving I-90 a little hairy at the peak of Lookout pass.  We made it over safely and almost immediately the temps began to melt the snow and the rain began.  This drastic change in the weather caused a few avalanches to slide onto I-90 which closed it down in both directions until the conditions got more safe.

     This was the first time I could ever remember the interstate being closed for an avalanche!  Making matters worse they couldn't tell when they were going to open it back up again because they weren't even sure how they were going to make the conditions safe.  Luckily though they had opened up a detour across the far Northern edge of Idaho so we could still make it home in time for Kelli to work.  It was just going to be about twice as long as the interstate would be.  So even though things looked interesting I still held out hope that the trip home would be pretty smooth.  Once again though my efforts to outsmart things backfired on me!  I decided when we left Missoula that I'd shorten our trip time by taking a cut across to the detour highway instead of taking the interstate all the way to St Regis where it was closed.  Things were going pretty good and then when we got to the intersection between the detour from the interstate and my short cut to the detour, we saw a couple of highway guys working on the detour sign.  I told Kelli I hope their not taking it down because the interstate had opened back up, she said no they couldn't be so we continued on up the detour.  When we got to Sandpoint, ID we stopped for dinner and got a text message from the Dobson's saying they opened up the interstate at 4 pm, had we taken the interstate we would have been there almost exactly at 4 pm!!

     But after many years of life's little lessons like this one we have taught ourselves to find the joys in these moments.  Even though this can be difficult at times, if you look really closely there's joy in every single one of them!  I believe that God puts us into these situations precisely for the reason of reminding us that there truly are some wonderful things in this world if we just pay attention to them.  It's not a good one because it was taken while we were moving but the picture below is proof of the hidden joy in our life's lesson.  We may have had to take a detour that we could have avoided resulting in us getting home, ironically like the last trip, 2 1/2 hours later than expected, but we were rewarded by one of the most beautiful sunsets we have ever seen!  The picture doesn't do it any justice at all as we couldn't stop commenting on how stunning it was!  Finding the hidden joys in situations like these just makes accepting them as part of this wonderful journey called life a little bit easier!

Remember, every detail of our journey is worth remembering, even the ones that are a little hard to handle on the surface!