“I’m not sure my kids can make the seven-hour trip without a DVD player.”
One of my daughters was contemplating a road trip in her family’s pickup truck. Unlike her van, the truck isn’t outfitted with an entertainment system.
Her kids would have to “rough it.”
My husband and I looked at each other and laughed.
We’re both products of military families. When we were children, our families made cross-country visits to relatives long before the existence of interstate highways, vehicle air-conditioning, and fast food restaurants.
A hard journey
During my family’s three-day treks from California to Mississippi, my older brother normally claimed the back seat. That meant when it was time to sleep at night I was forced to position myself across the hump in the floorboard. Meanwhile, my little sister crammed herself into the back packing shelf.
For hours on end we played versions of I Spy, Find A Car Tag From Each State, and Find Something With The Next Letter In The Alphabet, ad nauseum.
We traveled on two-lane roads across the Arizona desert and through the huge state of Texas, poking our heads through the windows to look for cactuses and tumbleweeds.
My dad regularly watched the gas gauge and checked his huge Atlas road map for the next town that might have a gas station. All the stations were full-service, closed at sunset, and offered no more than a soft drink machine for refreshments .
Plenty of drivers miscalculated the distance to the next town, ran out of gas, and ended up hitch-hiking with an empty gas can. We picked up a few of them.
At lunchtime we found a roadside rest area, pulled an ice chest out of the trunk, and spread bread, bologna and mayonnaise on an empty picnic table. While my siblings and I stretched our legs, my dad normally “rested his eyes” in the driver’s seat. Then he’d pour coffee into his Thermos cup and we’d set out again.
Every hard journey has an end
Surprisingly, neither my husband nor I cringe when we recall our families’ cross-country travels. No doubt my siblings and I irritated the heck out of each other, but those aren’t the memories that cling to me.
What I remember most vividly is my grandfather, who worked as a bridge tender in Biloxi, Mississippi. Alerted by a letter from my mom, my grandparents knew when to expect us. So, my grandfather was on the lookout.
As we neared the beach in Biloxi, everyone in the car got excited. When my dad finally steered our 1959 Plymouth onto the bridge, he let out a long blast of the horn. Then we hung our heads as far as we dared outside our windows to watch my grandfather wave from the bridge tender’s house. Not normally demonstrative, my grandfather’s boisterous wave was as close as I ever saw him get to cheering.
After days of traveling, we’d finally made it to our destination!
How to make it through hard times in life
We’re all on a journey of sorts. Making our way through life, navigating circumstances we can’t prepare for.
For some of us, it’s a hard journey.
But we can still navigate what kind of adventure this turns out to be.
We can bellyache about all the inconveniences we’re forced to suffer. We can spend too much time dreaming about the life that can’t be ours right now.
Or, we can make the best of this never-before-traveled road and look for blessings to call our own.
If we play our cards right, perhaps for most of us the memories that stick won’t be the awful ones. Maybe we’ll remember the blessings we stopped to count along the way.
A new destination is coming. There’s always a light at the end of the day.
In the meantime, we can curse all the things that don’t go our way. Or we can ask God to help us do our best to make the people around us glad we’re along for the ride.
When the end is in sight, what we’ll want others to remember is that we were there to cheer them on as we neared the other side.
Happy are those who are strong in the Lord, who want above all else to follow your steps. When they walk through the Valley of Weeping, it will become a place of springs where pools of blessing and refreshment collect after rains!
