The Lord is Gracious

I've had intense weekends before, but this one may or may not take the cake. (I think my head is still spinning trying to recover from it).

Friday at 7 I got off work and headed back to my place. Upon arrival, I ate a quick supper and Amanda, our new friend Danielle and I headed out for a Kalona adventure. (These are always the best kind)

This adventure was supposed to be simple:Watch movies at someone's house. Simple enough, but we'd never been to that person's house before and we're still very new to the area. So we trusted Amanda's GPS. This was a bad idea. The GPS told us to take a quaint little off road and as we drove up to it I was sure the dirrections had to be wrong. Of course I hesitated saying,  "This is a field entrance."
"No, it curves around, see it's a road" Amanda confidently told me.
"Well then, if the GPS says it, I suppose this is what we gotta do."

We only got a few yards into it when we realized that this "Road" was just a long stretch of 5 inch deep mud. At 10mph I was fish-tailing like I never have before but there was no stopping or turning back lest we be stuck in this field for the rest of the night. I thought about our options if we did get stuck but figured we'd best plow through it since the likelihood of a prompt and willing rescue might be a little slim. We were praying out loud and while we nearly went in the ditch 3 or 4 times, the Lord was gracious and we eventually found ourselves on a gravel road. I've never been more thankful for a gravel road or have thought of it as being such high quality, but I was glad of a new reason to be thankful for them. 

Once we got off the mud path and the stress of keeping the van out of the ditch had passed, we all three burst out laughing.
We arrived with inches of mud all over everything but had a splendid evening of movie watching with our friends that stretched into the wee hours of the morning. We were given better directions for our home return and arrived back at our apartment safe and sound. 

My Saturday morning was crazy with grocery shopping for the first time in 50 days in preparation for the brotherhood to come visit and help my sister move. Once home from that, I immediately set myself to work making shrimp scampi for the first time ever as all of them said they'd only come if there was lots and lots of food and one of them said he needed seafood. To my absolute delight he informed me that it was the best he'd had. (I'm an affirmation sort of person and so I felt so loved by this).  

The rest of the day was pretty packed with chatting, moving, resting, and more chatting. Since there were 7 of us when Pearl and Brooks joined our group, there was a lot of deliberation for our evening plans. At first we considered a baseball game that was an hour away, but that didn't work out. And then there was bonfire possibilities and other such things. The final consensus was to go swimming at a pool that could be accessed with little effort. 

As it was, Amanda and I had left our swimsuits at Amanda's old apartment. This was such the Lord because when we arrived home around 7 something, one of Amanda's roommates was laying on the floor next to a blanket and pillow, but not in her usual curled up position. We noticed her breathing being a little bit heavy and decided maybe we should wake her up to see if she was okay.
She didn't wake up and I decided that 911 would be a good idea. It was. 

It was a little after 9pm when Amanda and I found ourselves walking out of the ER after 2 of the most traumatic hours I've been through. It was a little like the previous night when we'd suddenly burst out laughing after surviving the muddy field apart from the fact that when we'd realized we'd survived something much more awful that we we burst into tears instead,
However, we were able to praise the Lord all the same for his timing in that we had to return to the apartment for our swimsuits and that none of our other plans for the evening hadn't worked out. 
We praised the Lord that her mom, though she lived 4 hours away, had already been on her way when we'd called 911 and was only an hour or so from Iowa City. 

It was a little after 10 when we arrived at our late night swimming location and it was exactly what we needed after our hectic evening. The water was warm and the moonlight was gorgeous. 

Sunday was a whole other compacted morning with lots more stops and visits, but by 2:45 we were back on our way to Kalona (I told you they're the best adventures) and this was epic. One of our wonderful friends was so kind as to let us shoot guns at his house and it was perfect.

I'm thankful my brothers were in town this weekend because they're very generous in their hug giving and words of peace and comfort. The Lord is gracious in all these things. 

There was a lot more to the weekend, but it's best left unsaid for now. Somethings are awful  enough to be forgotten forever. But in those things, one can still marvel at how gracious and good the Lord is. There was a lot of good things to ease the awful hard things. And the Lord is gracious in that. While the awful things will still happen, and there will continue to be bad things in life, the Lord is gracious by sending us people to go through it next to us. He is gracious by how he sends peace in the moments of chaos and uncertainty. I like that.