Road trips are hard. Different food. Less sleep. Interrupted routine. Interacting with lots of new people. As one of my bloggy friends likes to say, this is "life behind the prayer card". Of course, there are special joys, too. More snow for snowballs. Beautiful sunsets over city skylines. Meeting new people and deepening existing relationships.
On this particular trip, I was reminded of just how very selfish I am. I can cover it up most of the time, but when I'm exhausted and cranky and impatient, my nasty selfishness rears its ugly head. By contrast, Aaron gets more patient, more kind, more soft-spoken, more giving. He drives miles and miles and miles in all kinds of weather and keeps us safe. He still lets me drag him to the hotel exercise room to sweat. He doesn't complain when I'm running late. I'm grateful that I have a husband who constantly models to our family what it looks like to weed out selfishness.
"If I go to the local Chinese buffet and indulge my appetite, I do not have one plate. Thirty-seven plates later I tell myself that there are still edible delights that I need to enjoy! Healthy marriages are healthy because the people in those marriages have learned to recognize and say no to selfish instincts that lurk in their hearts and in the heart of every one of us. Selfishness is one of the big weeds that choke the life out of a marriage, and we must continually recognize that selfishness is first a condition of the heart before it is ever a set of choices, words, and behaviors."
~Paul David Tripp, "What Did You Expect?"
At the end of our road trip, we decided to introduce the girls to some local culture: Lamberts Café (aka home of the throwed rolls). It was exactly the shot of fun that we needed to finish the last few hours of our trip with tummies full of down home comfort food, refreshed to tackle the school books and the road ahead.
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