This past weekend we piled 13 Americans and 1 Canadian onto a bus and drove 7 hours through the winding mountains of Honduras, to the Caribbean. The girls really wanted to spend American Thanksgiving on the beach, so they threw together a trip plan in a matter of hours, and a few days later we were living in a beach house on the Atlantic Ocean. Sleeping in a real bed was glorious, seeing a real kitchen was surprisingly comforting and reading my bible by the ocean was overwhelmingly relaxing.
We started Thanksgiving swimming in the ocean, reading on the beach and walking through the cute beach town we were calling home for the weekend. Around noon, we headed home to start cooking and baking our Thanksgiving feast. The rest of the day was filled with warm air flowing from the owen and comforting smells of fall exploding from the kitchen, while iris blasted classic tunes. Once our feast was complete and set out, we thanked the Lord for making it possible to spend the holiday resting in the amazing beach house. Dinner was amazing– i’m living with some truly spectacular cooks. Everyone went around and said what they were thankful for. We spent a considerable amount of time laying on the floor, trying to digest the plates of food we all had devoured.
The night was going well, until about 2am when kate, abby and I all were hit with a very uneasy feeling in our stomachs. In short, we all spent the next 5 hours being violently sick. We were confined to bed the next day, lacking the energy to move. It’s been a very long time since I was as sick as that, and I became frustrated. I was living 5 minutes from the caribbean beach and didn’t even have the strength to get out of bed. But throughout that day God taught me a lot. He reminded me that sometimes I need to slow down. He reminded me that healing isn’t immediate, and it’s on His timing, not mine. He reminded me to rely on Him for my strength and to turn to Him when i’m weak. And He reminded me that (as I wrote about in a previous blog) that life isn’t always going to go the way I expect or want it to…but that’s okay. God is always in control, always beside me, every step of the way. Although I had to spend the day in bed instead of at the beach, I was with two of my closet friends. We were able to muster the strength to talk and laugh at ourselves/the situation we were in. I feel a lot closer to them after that weekend and hope they learned as much about myself and God as I did.
