Sometimes life can so easily blur between days and duties and the details that get us up in the morning. But often it is the little benchmarks along the way that offer us a little bit of “scrapbook-able” distance to see the difference between then and now. Christmas pictures. Journal entries. Distinguished annual events. For me, it is this trip to the Michigan lakehouse. Because this cottage is plopped on a quiet lake in the middle of a miniscule town in the middle of nowhere, you don’t have the easy vacation distractions of tourism, commercialism or any of the other -isms that chip away at creativity and invention. There is silence. And nature. And wonder.
Ten years ago, we journeyed up here as young parents with a toddler. I have so many memories of little tiny Emilie experiencing the sand and the water and feeding the geese and swans. As the first grandchild, it is a very distinctive time capsule in all of our minds.
Four years ago, we had all three leggy girls running after seagulls and holding the ropes on the sail boat. They participated in group crafts, fixed their own dinner plates and had their own opinions about what to do next. Dan and I stood by and watched our own growing nest with nostalgic pride, wondering how quickly they would be bringing their own children here, as his parents once brought him.
Then three years ago. Many early mornings found us rowing away from the dock with a guitar, a notebook and a sturdy-erasered pencil. We wrote many of our early songs on the water that year. And at night we would lay on the sand under the huge span of stars wondering what the future would hold. Where the music might lead. What God was up to.
Last year when we came, I had a very rough demo from our first session with the magnificent John Mark Painter (that’s his official name, in my book). It wasn’t perfect or complete, but it was something tangible and I was elated just to see progress. From the rowboat to the studio and into tomorrow. The possibilities seemed endless. It was only a couple weeks after that summer Michigan trip that we hammered a For Sale sign into our Virginia yard and began dreaming of Nashville.
Here. Today. Now.
It’s been and up and down journey this past year. Three steps forward, seemingly two steps back. But it is hard to know by which scales you measure a venture that is emotional and physical and spiritual all at once. Perhaps God has made his greatest strides in us (as opposed to for us) this year. Perhaps it was three spiritual steps forward, two physical steps back. Only God knows and that I must trust.
But it is a wonder to tuck a couple shiny CDs in the suitcase this year for Grandpa and Uncle and Cousin. To also have a couple books, which was an unforeseen and fulfilling benchmark all its own. And to look down the corridor of tomorrows and dream of how next year and the next year and then the next year will read when they are scrapbooked in the journals of life.