Today we saw a long-haired man driving a rusted-out minivan with screwdrivers wedged in the driver’s side window to keep it from falling open. He was driving with his knees eating hummus from a Tupperware dish with a fork. He’s a pretty good representative for the culture at large here. Welcome to Santa Cruz.
Here’s a bad angle of the first day of cleaning the Peter Pan. Better angles coming of subsequent days.
Misty: Can I get a “what what?”
Mike: “Why? Why?”
Our project directors are getting loopy from all the planning.
Ode to the Changing Table.
Jacq asked me (in her “the answer to this question is ‘yes’” voice) if I would bathe the baby while she did some laundry. The Days Inn bathtub looked easy enough to navigate, and I already knew the answer to the question, so I agreed.
I must not have bathed the baby in a few months. Last time I was in charge of infant cleaning he was a much less mobile child. This time he constantly crawled from one end of the tub to the other. By God’s grace and my right forearm he avoided drowning.
Clean? no. Done bathing due to risk? Yes. I grabbed a towel and draped it over him, but couldn’t get it all the way around because he thought the wiggling game sounded fun. Jacqueline looked up from sorting the laundry and laughed. She didn’t help. She just laughed.
A naked, half-dry, squealing baby in one hand and a full bag of diapers in the other, I waddled toward the bed. I laid him on the ground and frantically tore at the sides of the bag. The guy in charge of packaging over at the Huggies plant must have never tried to get into one of these puppies while his child scampered naked across the hotel carpet.
By the time I flung diapers all over the room opened the bag, LB was 25 feet away, diving head-first into our open luggage. All I needed now was for him to pee in our suitcase. Luckily, I jumped over Jacqueline’s piles of laundry and got to him in time to flop him onto his back and get a diaper at least 3/4 of the way on. Like a calf-roper on steroids, I felt a surge of relief at having avoided serious injury.
I glanced at Jacqueline who was trying unsuccessfully to hide her amusement. I collapsed on the couch and (in my “the answer to this question is ‘ok’” voice) said “He’s all yours.”
I wanna be a world-traveler.
With boots untied and a serious need to pee, I jogged past the visitor center, tripod tucked under my arm. I glanced at the time: 5:16 AM. I was hurrying to make it to Bright Angel Point, to watch the sun come up over the Grand Canyon. It was set to rise at 5:22. I got to a spot with a great view east and west, and set up the camera.
Then Marge showed up.
I shouldn’t know her name. I shouldn’t know that she has traveled to Africa and Alaska and the Alps. I also shouldn’t know that she has no desire to go to the Himalayas and that her favorite thing in the world is dessert in Italy.
I know all of that, from sitting about 30 feet from her watching the sun come up over the world’s most famous canyon.
That’s when it hit me. I am Marge. So caught up on myself and how cool I am that I can’t even enjoy what is going on in front of me. See, Marge didn’t come to the Grand Canyon to see the Grand Canyon. She came to the Grand Canyon to be able to later, sitting on a boat floating over the Great Barrier Reef, tell someone how beautiful the sun is when it comes up over the Grand Canyon.
And I do the same thing. In the first paragraph of this post I wanted you the reader to see how well traveled I am. I want to see the world, so that the world can see me. If I could figure out how to make it revolve around my shoulders, I would.
What a loss it would be to get to the end of my life, stand before Jesus, and tell him how many cities I have visitied, or how many pushups I can do, or how great my magnet collection is.
It’s my prayer that the gospel will continue to change me, and that someday I will actually be more about bringing God glory than about building my list of accomplishments.
But while we are on the subject of my accomplishments, and I can now claim to have peed into the Grand Canyon, just before sunrise.