“Watching and waiting,
looking above,
echoes of mercy,
whispers of love.”
(from Blessed Assurance by Fanny Crosby)

My husband said, “Let’s go!” So we went.

I wasn’t expecting it at all, but he said he could take a few days off and unseasonably warm weather on the left half of the continent made a road trip in February feasible. We looked at a map and determined the closest place with sandal-worthy temperatures was Northern California.

The first thing I saw when we got out of the car after two and a half days of driving was a tree in bloom.

A few days before we left I kept hearing and seeing the word “adapt” in a dream. Frankly, I started bracing myself for another challenge. What now, I thought. I realized instead, as I was looking for sandals and summer clothes to quickly toss in a suitcase, that “adapt” this time meant adapting to a pleasant surprise.

We’re home now, after a wonderful ten days in a different world with sun and palm trees and spring flowers. There is ice on the sidewalk here and work piles up again. It will be another three months before my plum tree is in bloom, but I feel like I had a foretaste of what is to come.

He does that, my Abba God. It’s a kind of now and not yet gift. He allows us to experience a taste of what He has planned, a remembrance of the future. And it gives us hope.

Hope is vision-led endurance.

Thank you, Lord.

Thank you.