We love celebrating Christmas with family. So even though the forecast in South Texas indicated perfect temperatures for a Christmas day swim in the pool, we headed north instead. It's a 13-hour drive from Mission, Texas to our first destination in Oklahoma to see relatives. But before we left, we put our Christmas cards in the mail. We wanted to wish everyone reading the blog a Merry CHRISTmas. We also wanted to remember why we are celebrating, and proclaim once again that "Christ is Born!"
The Christmas letter we mailed with the above card summed up our year in the following way:
Merry Christmas! Our Christmas card
proclaims that “Christ is Born!” and we hope you are celebrating that miracle
this season. We were excited to get to spend Thanksgiving with family, and had
time to take this quick snapshot. When we compare it to pictures from Christmases
past, we see that our little boys have somehow turned into men with day-old
beards. How did that happen?
Our oldest son, Luke, is seated with his sweet wife Jordan standing behind him. They are still living in Kansas City, where Luke is in the second year of his pediatric residency at Children's Mercy Hospital. He worked an all-nighter at the hospital before they loaded into the car for the six-hour drive to meet us in the Oklahoma panhandle. So if he looks tired, that could be because he hadn't slept for a couple days when the picture was taken. Jordan is a PA, working in a family-care practice in Kansas City. We were blessed to spend a week with them and Jordan’s family in Myrtle Beach,
South Carolina this summer. In their spare time, they are kept busy with their puppy,
a 60-pound golden doodle that got his first taste of ranch life on this
Thanksgiving trip.
Our son Blake is standing in the center of
the picture, and he just drove four hours from Oklahoma City to meet us in the panhandle.
This year he has traveled to meet us many places. We saw him in Arkansas for
his birthday in March; in the mountains of north Georgia in May; at the ocean
in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in June; Virginia and West Virginia for
beautiful fall leaves in October; and hiking in Arkansas in November. He purchased another plane ticket to see us in South Texas right before Christmas. We have
gotten to spend more time with him this year than when we were working in
Oklahoma! He is finishing his third year as an engineer for Chesapeake Energy,
with a schedule and vacation time that allows for the travel he loves.
He must have inherited that from his
parents, because Mark and Denisa obviously love to travel as well. We are
finishing up our second year of living full-time in our motor home, traveling
all over the United States. As we continue to “Wander His Wonders,” we are
daily inspired by the powerful God that created and designed all these wonders. When we sold the house and gave everything else away, we were often asked how
long we were planning to continue this full-time travel adventure. Our answer
was, “Two to thirty years.” We’ve made the minimum, so we are heartily heading
towards the maximum now.
The 2016 travel loop took us east, where we spent
several weeks in each of 16 different states. The short summary of this year’s
travels would include heading east along the coast during the winter months;
then heading north across the eastern seaboard in the summer; so we could spend
the autumn following the fall foliage trail southwest back to Oklahoma.
We made
a road trip in the middle of that journey to return to Oklahoma to celebrate
Mark’s Father’s 90th birthday in August. As we celebrated 35 years
of marriage this year, we also got to witness (and even photograph) two
different random marriage proposals during our travels. Our plans for 2017 include heading up the west coast to
the Pacific Northwest, wandering His wonders in a new section of the country. But for now we celebrate Christmas and God's ultimate
wonder that “Christ is Born!”
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