Some of you know our work-week evening schedule includes a TV viewing of Jeopardy. Included often in the question categories is one entitled Potpourri, which I take as a mixed bag of unrelated items without a common theme.
That word describes our holiday week, Christmas to New Years, 2019-2020.
Some were planned, some were not.
Some were standard activities for those calendar days, some were not.
But all were part of a Holiday collage that will stick in our memories.
Thursday, the day after Christmas, we took off for North Carolina.
We had two purposes in mind.
One was to deliver some books to an organization in Raleigh, books that would be sent to prisons throughout the US to Chaplains who would use those to loan and give to inmates to further their work in leading men and women to Christ.
(Seated left to right Sydney and Karen, Standing Sawyer, Papa, Carolyn and Dwayne)
The other was to visit our son Dwayne and his wife Karen. They live in Cornelius and their two grown kids, Sawyer and Sydney, were home from San Francisco for the Holidays.
From Cornelius we traveled north and east into Virginia to visit a friend of ours who had moved last year to live with her son in Yorktown. Louise McMinn had been a friend and companion to Carolyn in the years after her husband Bruce passed away in 2001.
Louise was glad to see us, and she and my wife had a great time remembering and catching up on people and events.
One more item in our planning came to fruition as we stopped Sunday night, on our way back toward our Tennessee home. We stopped in Gibsonville, NC to spend the night with an old friend of mine, Jim Sprague, and his wife Bonnie, who opened their home to weary travelers and then sped us on our way rested, after a good night and a homemade breakfast.
This trip also had some unplanned events, as most do, and they stuck out in my mind as I looked back on this 5 days on the road.
When we travel we use an app on the phone, Waze, a route mapping and travel alert application that has stood us in good stead for some time now. It is a turn-by-turn companion that we follow, sometimes even when we don't know why. We trust it to get us to our destinations and keep us out of trouble on the highways.
But Waze sometimes deviates us from our planning and leads us on roads we had not planned to travel.
Two incidents on this trip caused us to wonder "Why?"
We had studied our planned trip on regular maps and figured, what we thought was the fastest and best way to travel. But, as we sped north on I-95, Waze told us to exit at a certain exit and proceed east on secondary roads toward Yorktown.
This we did, mainly because Waze had earned our trust by keeping us from traffic tie ups on previous trips.
As we exited the freeway, I was distracted by something and missed a turn that I should have taken on this new route. Oh well, I'll just go up to the next exit, turn around, and come back to pick up the right exit.
There is no picture to insert here, mainly because I did not take one, so you will have to picture in your mind what happens next. As we proceeded up the ramp of the turnaround exit, we noticed a man standing at the top, with a sign in his hand.
This is always a small dilemma in my mind when this happens. What is the right thing to do? Look the other way? Find some change to give the man? or what?
At that moment Carolyn spoke up and said, "we have that sandwich that we saved from lunch here in the takeout box", and the dilemma was settled.
I rolled down my window and called for the man to come over, gave him the box, and prepared to move on when the light turned green. But he had something to say:
"God bless you sir, this food is more welcome than money."
I made my turns to return to the route Waze had set out for us, thinking all the while, "Was this the reason I missed my turn, and was I supposed to be right here, right now?"
Dismissing the man from my mind (temporarily it seems), I concentrated in getting back on the Waze programmed route, which turned about to be a two-lane state highway cutting east through the southeast part of Virginia.
We saw a small sign which read "Sussex County Courthouse" with the arrow pointing east on our route. Not ever wanting to miss a courthouse, when the sign appeared later, pointing right into the town of Sussex, we left the route again.
What did we find? An 1825 old brick courthouse, still apparently in use, in the small town. It is one of the oldest that I have found in my travels, a jewell for sure. And to think that if I had used my planned route, we would have missed it.
An aside: when we left the area on Sunday after church, Waze took us on the freeway all the way to our destination in NC. I'm still not sure why we were directed to that state road on Friday, but if we had not turned at the courthouse sign, that wonderful old building, with all its History, would still be there waiting for us.
The moral of this story might well be "Hold your plans lightly in your hands, God may want to break into those with a person or a place that will be a blessing, one that you would have never experienced in your planning."
We are home, comfortably sitting on the sofa, waiting for Jeopardy, and remembering fondly the unplanned adventures we found, or more aptly, may have found us.
