We need a vacation
because we just got back from vacation
Maeve thinks my alarm clock is a toy. Daily my daughter presses its buttons and dials; changing the times without letting me know and leaving it in mysterious places around the house. She smiles at the ticky-tacky click, click each squeeze makes. During the school year this could be a problem. This past week, it wasn’t — because we were on vacation.
Vacationing, with a young family, is doing your best to keep your kids alive in a location that, in retrospect, could have been more forgiving of the attempt.
The first two days of our trip we drove over 6 hours, took a 90 minute ferry ride, and walked over 22,000 steps (~9 miles) while hauling our two little ones around in a red wagon that Canadians, apparently, had never seen anything like before. The kids weren’t into the sightseeing, though seeing a full-sized woolly mammoth was at least slightly well-received. For Mom and Dad, our vacations usually revolve around the cuisine. But this time, Eating fish and chips, Indian-inspired seafood, and Tim-Horton’s coffee and doughnut collaboration with Justin Bieber weren’t as great as the Pacific prawns and Dungeness crab our AirBnB hosts gave us from their fishing trip. We managed to cook those at 9:00 P.M. on Saturday evening after willing the kids to sleep.
On the third day of “vacation” we finally got somewhere closer to the right setting for a young family: taking our kids to the Great Wolf Lodge in Washington state. This place is a kid’s casino full of waterslides, magic, and disturbingly few clocks. Enthusiasm levels were up and we enjoyed a great time together making memories.
In the 12th chapter of Luke, Jesus gives two brothers arguing over an inheritance a warning:
Be careful and guard against all kinds of greed. Life is not measured by how much one owns.
Jesus then tells the story of a rich man who, rather than seeing his excess crops as an opportunity for generosity, decides to tear down his barns and build bigger ones to store up all of his stuff. Nearly 400 years ago, Rembrandt painted a portrait of this rich man from Luke 12:
This picture begs the questions Why are you alone? and Don’t you have something better to do than count up your money and possessions late into the night? If this image were on a brochure titled Building Wealth: What the Good Life is All About, I think most of us would throw it away and sign up for a different approach to the good life.
The writer of Ecclesiastes left us this discouraged passage:
I hated all the things I had worked for here on earth, because I must leave them to someone who will live after me. Someone else will control everything for which I worked so hard here on earth, and I don’t know if he will be wise or foolish. This is also useless. So I became sad about all the hard work I had done here on earth. People can work hard using all their wisdom, knowledge, and skill, but they will die, and other people will get the things for which they worked. They did not do the work, but they will get everything. This is also unfair and useless. What do people get for all their work and struggling here on earth? All of their lives their work is full of pain and sorrow, and even at night their minds don’t rest. This is also useless.
Someone hadn’t told him that this entire thing is a gift — including his wisdom, skills, and the success he enjoyed. I hope someone talked to him about philanthropy and leaving a legacy before he passed.
Or even on the value of taking your kids on trips they won’t remember. It’s an opportunity to be generous with your money and with your life. We are tired, but we are grateful we did it together. It gives meaning and purpose to the alarm clock going off every day at 5:00 A.M. — unless Maeve hid it in the kitchen cabinet again.
