A Simple Miracle

When I started this blog-thing a few days ago, I thought this sort of entry would be the kind I wouldn't write--that is, a super simple, super personal, generally inartistic (I know that makes me sound incredibly pretentious, so take it as "he's learning, so we'll forgive him for now, at least until he proves himself a snot again") and undeveloped post.  Well, yeah, I'm learning.

Several months ago, my wife won four day pass tickets to Lagoon, a theme park here in Utah.  Under normal circumstances it's too expensive a place for us to visit casually, much less spontaneously, enough so that even with the free passes, we didn't make any plans.

Well, we've got nothing right now.  (And I'm not bothered by it, actually; the freedom is incredible.)  But we've been stuck in the house without the ability to go anywhere long enough that we've all been suffering a bit from cabin fever.  So, we decided to go.  Someone helped us out with gas.  Someone helped us out with food.  We scraped together eight bucks in change to pay the parking fee, and we went.

And we had a blast.

We didn't spend a penny while we were there, but we rode rides and walked around and doddered about the little pioneer village and museums and ate food and generally had a ringing blast for a solid ten hours today.  And people, if that's not a miracle, I don't know what one is.  My kids know we don't have a lot of money, but they don't know how stuck we really are.  They don't need to know.  (They're 5 and 2 for crying out loud!)  My wife and I've done nothing but hunted for jobs and tried to make valuable connections for ten days now, amid the scattered interviews, stops at Work Force Services, and whatnot.  But it's interesting (and I wasn't planning on this when I started writing five minutes ago), how our lives have changed and even for the better.  We walk places more.  We chose our food more carefully.  We cook everything ourselves at home.  We read more books.  We're going to bed at more reasonable times and waking up earlier too.  We're more productive.  I get to walk my boy to the bus stop.  I sit and work side-by-side with my beautiful wife and we peck away at application after application. 

Hmm.  As I'm writing this, I can't help but think that, yeah, Lagoon today was a small miracle, but in a way, this whole new facet of our life that's technically (professionally, though I employ my time as directly and fully as ever) unemployment might be its own sort of miracle.  Sometimes life's really hard, especially when we bog ourselves down with it.  Sometimes,  though, with just the right perfectly timed lift, you can see it for what it really is: pretty friggin' great, and thank God for that.