Drinks, drinks everywhere.  My husband figures it's because people don't want to think of how much they're spending on their vacation and because they probably don't much like the person they're with.  I have to give him that.
     This week has been our first trip to the beach in six years, and even that was a disaster relief deployment.  This week was also our first alcohol free vacation.  I have to give him that, also.
     We had no plans for a vacation this summer, until one of our daughters accepted a job as a beach lifeguard.  Her Daddy wasn't "having it" without going to inspect.  Turns out it's a reputable company that's been there a long time.  The interesting thing is that there are hardly any Americans.  The owner said that their American lifeguards are "lazy."  Instead, they have foreign exchange students from all over Europe and Russia.  Our daughter is the only American girl.  She has YMCA life guarding certifications and work experience that must've paid off.  Her past swim team experience gave her to power and drive to swim the mandatory test, 500 yards in under 12 minutes, having practiced for less than a week.
     The day after we arrived we set out to find her at her post.  She hadn't returned from lunch, so we got to talk with her Polish trainer, who says he makes more money here in half a year than he can with his degree in his home country, which he returns to for the winter months.  He also said after working with her for a couple of days that she works harder than the last couple of guys he's trained.         After feeling more secure about her environment, we could relax a little and enjoy the beach and the pool with our younger two.  Then, my husband decided our daughter with the twins ought to come, also.  So, that child of ours packed up their stuff in about 15 minutes and drove four and a half hours by herself, arriving well after midnight, so the babies could go to the ocean for the first time, since they didn't have a plan to vacation either.
      Her husband stayed behind, still mourning the loss of his grandmother, who passed just after the babies' second birthday party was underway last weekend.  He kindly said they ought to go.  For the most part, we shored her and the babies up, and while we were busy enjoying their excitement, our youngest daughter was making a friend, from Ukraine, no less.  They played for hours.  Then, I finally met her six foot tall mother.  She was quick to let me know that she had a limited English vocabulary, although they'd been living in the states for over three years.  She's a stay-at-home mom and says even when she is out with other moms, they really don't talk to her.
      She was so very happy to have someone to communicate with.  She told me so.  I asked if they had only the one girl, and when she answered, "Yes, we have been trying for more than nine years, but I thank God for her," I was pretty sure she was a fellow believer.  So, I asked and she said, "Yes, how do you say it, 'Baptist?'"  I utterly loved hearing her talk, although she was often frustrated with herself to find the right words.  When I couldn't figure out what she meant, she would look away and whimsically say, "Never mind."
      Our girls wanted to go to the beach that night, so her husband and mine, and she and I got to talk while the kids looked for treasures in the sand and sculpted faces in it.  I asked her about church in Ukraine, and she said, "It is Orthodox."  Then she touched her heart looking for words and came up with, "Their heart is closed to God ...but our church in America, their hearts are open to God," as she looked up to the sky.  "I learn so much about God since I have been here."
      After the fireworks, we were walking back up to the hotel and she had her daughter interpret for me, "My mom says, 'You make her feel so free to talk.'"  I take that very seriously, especially considering they are here on political asylum, because of Russia's invasion of the border.  Freedom probably means a lot more to her in so many ways than it does to me.
      Last night, our girls wanted ice cream and to swim once more, but since a storm had blown through, it was too cold and windy outside.  So, we sat indoors by the heated pool.  Loud and hot as it was, I couldn't let her departure go by without a prayer.  I still feel uneasy taking charge of such a sacred thing, but I held her hand and before I could start, she smiled at me and said, "Thank you." After the fact, I realized I may have spoken too quickly for her to understood me, but God did.  And if there is one thing I have learned, it's that when we obey, God listens.
     And this is why we need to be sober on vacation and everywhere, because we just never know when these things are going to happen.

     Sitting by the garden, waiting for the rain, my husband reminded me of the newest preconception brought out by his old hunting truck paired, no less, with his old overalls.  He's started taking our youngest son to the high school's football workouts.  And at a prior activity with the athletic director, he was rather dismissed, having driven up in the beat-up, old Toyota.
    The whole purpose has been to get our son on the team but only on campus for two classes, as our state's new law allows.  As far as we know, he will be the first homeschool student in the county, at least at that school, to try it out.  His older brother went as far as an out of state boarding school to continue in sports.  One older sister went full-time public high school in order to participate, which did not go as planned.  So, we hope and pray that this "marriage" will be suitable for our younger son.
    Every Christian parent should consider while their children are participating in youth, public team sports that they might get good enough to play in high school, then college, which lends itself to the desire of participating at the highest level, and that is unlikely at a small, private, Christian institution, scholarship or no.  So, there your young adult is, on scholarship at a publicly funded university, the system feeding your child that which is "right in his own eyes," just as in the days of the book of Judges that the younger two and I finished up yesterday.
      So far, our older children have had the wherewithal not to subscribe to farfetched ideologies, willing and able to debate the teachers.  But the student culture is where things get hairy, especially in the subculture of team camaraderie: the music, the language, the "activities."  All these things are insidious for a young person away from home who has no one to answer to at the end of the day but the team.
     And that's where you hope you still have some influence to encourage that child who is continually in close proximity to what amounts to Paganism (many participants professing Christ, yet denouncing Him in deed) to take some sort of stand, because the student's sitting back and tolerating it is only a lie to tempt them into the "it's not so bad" excuses.
     And before they know it, they're one of "them."  The truth is that the Christian is either growing or withering.  We don't get to make up the option of just standing still.  Influence or be influenced.
     And that is what we are wanting to convince our younger son of.
     "Yes, you're the new guy.  But when the coach asks if anybody has music they want to play, speak up...," just like he did yesterday here at home in our daily reading, giving special attention to this verse in John 7, "Judge not according to appearance, but judge righteous judgment."
     It is easy to pin that one on the athletic director, since he had a better attitude when he saw my husband drive up in the newer car and in better clothes, or newer overalls anyway.  But we all do this to some degree, fair as we may be.
     God is perfect in this though. Acts 10:34-35, "Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is  no respecter of persons.  But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him."  Just now, after looking up "respect," I find three definitions before the one most similar to the Bible's, "deference to a right, privilege, privileged position, or someone or something considered to have certain rights or privileges."  God does not have "respect" of persons, of positions of authority, yes, but not "respect" among people who believe.  So, why do we?  And why do we change the term "fear God" to "respect God?"  Fearing God is understanding that he is the ultimate authority, the final say, the all in all.  So, please do not change my Bible to say that I ought to respect God.  I have much more than that for Him.  I defer all things to Him and to Him all things I owe.
    

    "It was obvious the indentations on the bullet were teeth marks," maybe human, maybe animal, the implication the same, agony of someone's warrior son, whether he was for or against the cause, fighting for his life.

     Mike has always had an interest in all things anthropology. He's dug up an Indian paint pot, convinced the whole family to spelunk, explore old caves, and has recently taken up metal detecting again. Turns out there was a Union Army camp just on the ridge behind us.  Our county was a hotbed of Union sympathizers in an otherwise Confederate state. Mike has read the details from the Library of Congress of the troops' movements through our area and shared them with anybody and everybody who will listen.
     Our sons and sons-in-law are Mike's detecting companions now, so much so that one son-in-law has moved his weekends around to spend them here, which also brings our daughter and their twin toddler girls into our company.  This last trip gave McKala and me time to really talk for the first time in a really long time.

     Sons, sons-in-law, fathers, brothers, husbands, I can't conceptualize what it was like having all the men in one's family leave for war, the women and children left unprotected and the soldiers often destitute of basic needs and wounded by the distinct kinds of bullets we're finding.  These days, our most common concerns as Christian mothers of young men is whether or not they're "doing right," not whether or not they might die today, tomorrow, or next month.  There must have been prostrate praying that we as this "postmodern" nation take for granted and sit back on its "lees" as written in Zephaniah 1:12, "And it shall come to pass at that time, that I will search Jerusalem with candles, and punish the men that are settled on their lees:  that say in their heart, The LORD will not do good, neither will he do evil."
      On this Memorial Day, with all its swimming and eating, I hope some of our family looked back on that hill and thought of the bewildered, homesick men whose sometimes only recreation was to carve a bullet into a chess piece or an animal head, while waiting for the the next encounter with death.

     Recently, Mike has been searching out plantation properties and other camp ridges from maps he's found, asking for permission to detect, sharing history, and getting to know the neighbors, something that he's never really had, neighbors, not for himself anyway.  He was always on the road or recovering from the road when he was home.
     The other morning, he stepped out of the house and heard a planer.  Since he's needing one to make a wooden truck bed, he jumped in the car to see which neighbor it was.  That neighbor invited him back, so Sunday he and I went together to search the premises for metal.  After some work on a  tractor, a couple of hours detecting, and a good practical joke in the breezes under a great big walnut tree, we wound up having tea with him and his wife on their porch, circa 1893, and having a little tour of their house and studios.  He's a musician, and she's an artist.  And Madalynn, our musician and artist, can't wait to go visit them.  Seems like this metal detecting is taking us places, including back into the realm of writing, as he is the one who challenged me to write again, based on the introductory sentence he assigned.
     So, here I am on a Tuesday morning doing what I love, after sleeping as long as we could stand the 57 degree chill in the hammocks we hung in our own "campsite" by the fire pit Mike had the kids create yesterday, still none of us having a particular inkling of the trepidation the men must have had, camping behind us March 29 through April 1, 1865 in the cold and the wet of the nor'easter with no way of knowing the Civil War would end in only 14 days.