Traveling and Gods Directions

The past couple of days have been fun. On Saturday the wife and I headed out to the Blue Ridge Mountains to meet up with the Wilson clan for a family vacation. This would be the first that I and my brother-in-law Brent have attended since we both wed two of the three Wilson girls.

Anyone that has ever traveled with me knows that I love to travel. The one area that I could improve on is the preparation for the travel. For some reason, and I can't explain, I turn into a bear when we are getting ready. I get moody and short. My wife, who has experienced this more than anyone, understands this and, for the most part, lets me be. I'm not sure if I am worried about forgetting something or what, but I do know that I see travel as a time schedule and if we are not on it, I start getting stressed. I like to get on the road with no hassles and put 'life' behind us.

Once we got on the road, I calmed down and we had a rather pleasant drive. The area of Blue Ridge Mountains we are staying at are tucked away in an area that basically is the tip of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Think the Ocoee River for some of you that have been near there. Where we are staying is actually in Georgia. As I was saying, the drive is beautiful. We took the route that takes us across the bottom of Tennessee, into Alabama, into Georgia, back into Tennessee, and then into Georgia again. The wife slept most of the way to the cabin, which should have taken us around five in a half hours. I say should because we ran into some trouble finding the cabin.

Once we made it to the point where our GPS no longer detects roads, we followed our printed out Google maps version. It said to take a right on Hardscrabble then a left on to Laurel Springs. CHECK. Once on Laurel Springs, go .3 miles and take a right onto Dana Rd (Which is where our cabin is). CHECK. Oh wait...there is no Dana Rd. So we drove up this street 3 times trying to find Dana Rd to no avail. My wife was manning the directions and I was following them to a T. Obviously she did something wrong! So she tried calling my father in law, but she couldn't get a signal. So we backtracked a bit and went back a few streets to make sure we didn't miss something. I pulled into a Dollar General about to walk in. I looked at the directions and pointed something to her that she missed. I had printed out text directions as well as mapped directions street by street. All you had to do is LOOK AT THE MAP and see what the next street was near DANA Rd. Pretty simple huh?

I'm being nice in this 'depiction' of our journey because it was anything BUT nice. I basically told her that she couldn't read directions and THIS is how you do it. So I went back where we were missing and was going to show her! The problem...still no Dana Rd. Fortunately we were able to get a signal (I did with my phone) and called my father in law to which he told me that you had to turn onto RHONDA RD (which we saw) and then turn onto Dana Rd. So we finally made it...only an hour later than we should have. And a good argument in between.

Moral of that story for me. Be cognitive of my words to my wife. I didn't want to talk for a bit after that and it occurred to me later Saturday night that it was exactly what Satan wanted me to do. Here we are trying to get away from 'life' and enjoy each others company and yet he used something as stupid as bad directions to cause an argument. It's amazing to sit back and realize how the enemy can interject himself into something so small and make it so big.

I thought about asking Heather for us to pray before we left on the trip. That God would watch over us in our travels and continue to bring fruit to our marriage and conversations. I thought about it and decided I didn't want to. Turns out I should be more sensitive to the spirit when my convictions are telling me something.

Turns out I neglected the most important directions before the trip ever started.