Vacation before the vacation

OK, I have been utterly slacking. I admit it.

But there is a legitimate reason behind the almost 2-week absence from my usual blogging activities...

We are ON VACATION!


As a family anchored by a policeman, vacations that involve actually going away to another location must happen at rather odd times of the year. Police officers don't tend to be able to take time off during or near the actual traditional holidays. Christmas? New Years? If those holidays fall on the day your shift is scheduled to work, you work. If you have worked on Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Years for eleven years in a row, that does not buy you a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card. If those holidays fall during your shift again this year, you are working them again this year. So, while everyone else on the circling planet is drinking eggnog around a beautifully lit tree, celebrating Christmas Eve service, or ringing in the New Year with streamers and champagne (Dr. Pepper if you are me, but I digress), my beloved Copper and hundreds of thousands of his fellow cops are standing guard, patrolling our streets, and working to keep us safe.

While earnestly wishing with all their hearts that they could be home with their families at such blessed, special moments in time as Christmas, celebrating the birth of Jesus with their own children.

With that reality in mind, we have become adept at improvisation. This year, we are celebrating both early and late, since Copper will be working a wretched shift that will take him away from our home and family on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Years' Eve AND New Years' Day. So, we carved out our own Christmas family vacation and have been at the beach since December 3, to return December 16. This is where our real Christmas will happen. Yes, it is early. And yes, it is kind of weird to be romping around the sunny shores of Maui while celebrating a blessed holiday that falls in the dead of winter and usually involes images of snow. But, here we are. Improvisation has it's upside. And we are loving being together and finding new reasons to be grateful each day.

There you have it - the catalyst for my being a wee bit distracted. Happily, delightfully distracted.

It is necessary, this distraction, as 2007 promises leap-of-faith events for our family which are already causing us to need to draw upon reserves from seldom tapped reservoirs to weather with grace and God-given wholeness. So we are especially appreciative of this "vacation before the vacation" that we are afforded right now. A time to top off those deep wells in our souls, stock up on prayer and laughter, and add a a few rows to the ongoing family quilt we are ten years into making, and enjoy our children rather than live with our children. Time to teach and to learn. Time to talk and to listen. We just need time, unabridged, with each other. Time.

I wish all of my life - each one of my days - happened the way these days have: deliberately and with utmost purpose, living without regret and sucking the marrow from each moment.

But then, the fact that it doesn't indicates how far from the will of God I'm currently travelling in my non-vacationers "real" life, now doesn't it?