Lent Day 13

The goal was to give up laziness in all aspects of my life.  I want to be a better Christian, husband, father, friend, employee, etc . . .  I can do all of these things if I just get up and let God work in my life.

Today for lunch I went shopping for hiking / camping supplies.  While out, I met a 61 year old man who is about to embark on the north half of the Appalachian Trail with his 21 year old son.  This trip of about 1,000 miles will complete the entire AT with his son.  He told me stories about his first hikes on the trail with his kids when his daughter was 7 and his son was just 5 years old.  As I get ready to do a mere week on the AT myself, I found inspiration in this gentleman; inspiration for the AT hike and inspiration to spend more time with my boys.

I am inspired by my friend who has a week alone with one of his daughters.  I saw a picture of them just riding their bikes together.  I know why he took the picture; you could almost feel the pride through the camera lens.  Then tonight, I really enjoyed watching the two of them walk away from the ball field together.  The sun was setting and all was well with them.  There is something really special about getting one on one time with one of your children.

Sometimes things happen for a reason . . . or at least it is up to us to make the best out of potentially bad situations.  This evening my wife became ill and my youngest decided he needed to go to bed early.  This left Tyler and me to fend for ourselves.  Isn’t that funny how things work out sometimes?  Tyler was a great helper gathering the chicken eggs tonight.  He really amazed me when I turned around and saw him standing there holding a hen.  “What are you doing with that chicken son?”

Well, I still have to exercise and watch Tyler.  “Come on son.  We’re going out.”  I had to explain to him what I have been doing for the past 12 days, but I chose to get down the road before I filled him in on the agenda for tonight.  We got about a quarter mile and he stopped running, looked up at me, and asked quizzically, “how far are we going?”  “About 3 miles buddy.  We better pace ourselves.” 

I was trying to slow down for Tyler by running zig zags when all of a sudden I almost stepped on a snake.  We checked it out and sure enough, it was alive.  It was just a small Oak snake.  That was a cool wild life experience my Mom would surely enjoy.  I’ll send her pictures later.  We were able to hear the owls that have been hooting back and forth each night.  The best part was when I would explain to him, “That the next house has dogs.  We’re going to be really quiet so we don’t alert them.  We are going to jog a steady pace all the way past and out of sight.”  Then just when we are about out of sight, I tell him, “We better run, I think I heard the dogs coming.”  Man, if that kid would run like that on the baseball field, we would have a star athlete!