Blog Post 5–Friday, September 6, 2024

Yup. I am sitting here eating my Cadbury chocolate bar, ruminating on two days of fairly non-stop activity.

Coming to N. Ireland and Scotland feels much more like home now. The look, sound and smell of these places are familiar. I still love to see fields of rambling sheep, or signs for ‘neeps and tatties’ (new turnips and new potatoes), but they are now hallmarks of another home for me. God is gracious in extending my territories and I am being nourished by my reconnection with family and place.

Yet we’ve faced some serious challenges in the past few days regarding online access to finances, credit card challenges and other anxiety producing issues that felt kind of terrifying, to be honest. What do you do if you are traveling and all the planning you did to access your finances kind of comes to a grinding halt? I can tell you that the best decision we made was our phone provider which includes unlimited international access to data and text messages. That gave us immediate access to calls and texts as soon as we landed. We have called more than one financial institution this week! Things seem to be working out now, and we are grateful that we started our trip in a familiar place rather than hopping directly off a plane to Italy.

But there is something about Scotland….

We took the ferry over today, and it’s not a small boat, but a three story mock-cruise ship that travels super-fast through the North Sea Channel between Belfast and Cairnryan, Scotland. The boat can hold up to 660 cars in its hold and up to 1200 passengers above. It’s massive.

And the weather today was unbelievable—beautiful, sea-sparkling, salt-spraying weather that I stood in outside the main deck with my hair becoming a tangle of old-lady knots and glitter. I could taste the salt on my lips, feel it spritz through my hair, see the haze of it flying off the surface of the Channel as we sped through. I felt invigorated and inconsequential at the same time as I stood out there in the salt-misted sunshine, the wind strong enough to nearly knock me over, but the taste of that breeze and the freshness of that wind stay with me even as I sit in my hotel room now.

We got on a bus from there to Glasgow, and every part of the journey takes effort, but it isn’t a bad thing. Each thing we do, each bus we drag our suitcases onto, every ferry we ride and the trains we will eventually board—these are the point of the sabbatical as much as the destinations are. I learned this today—sabbatical is not about grabbing the most out of every situation but about enjoying the singularity of each experience.

I’ll give you an example. I bought a bottomless cup of coffee on the boat. Quite often I drink 2 or 3 cups to get the most value out of my 3 pounds (can’t find the symbol on my keyboard), but today I had my single cup of coffee and just enjoyed it. Sabbatical is teaching me something about savoring the world, not squeezing the most out of it.

Then the final challenge today—the rental car. We had booked a small car and realized we needed a more robust car for the next two weeks of travel through the highlands of Scotland, in addition to needing more room for the massive suitcases. The rental agent put us into a ridiculous luxury SUV that was literally smarter than we were. It was just too much car for us, too fancy, too big—white leather seats?!? For a woman who eats Cadbury in the car?? We never left the lot and went back in to get a more suitable car for us and we settled into a great MG SUV (oxymoron, I know!!). Sporty, comfy and just right.

However, we had been nervous about going back in and advocating for ourselves—who turns down a Mercedes? But when we got the smaller, more basic car, we knew we had done a good thing. And we were thankful to God for leading us to speak out, speak up and learn a new lesson in self-awareness. This is OUR trip, and we need to make decisions that equate with our needs and values. I’m just not a Mercedes kind of girl.

But there’s more to the story. When we got to our hotel, we had to give the front desk our license plate number and when I read the number, I was delighted—-LF73 ADK!!! Do you see those three letters at the end? ADK!!! It was like a little affirmation that we had done the right thing.

So now I am at home in my adopted home even while driving in a car that reminds me of my actual home. Really, truly—God is so good all the time.
My bible verse for today: “Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters, they saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep. For God commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea.” (Psalm 107:23 - 25)