While I was on vacation, my parents were in an accident.
I don’t know where I was, what I was doing. But before seven one chilly Iowa morning, two deer collided with their Chevy–one over the hood, one beneath the car. My grandmother, traveling a safe distance behind them in her own car, slammed into them when my dad hit his brakes. Airbags billowed to life everywhere. Both vehicles were totaled.
I probably don’t need to tell you how relieved that of the three of these dear people, all walked away completely unscathed—not even sore the next day. I am thankful for insurance companies and rental cars and wise engineers (go, airbags!) and the helpers God places around us when bad things inevitably happen on this mortal coil.
There was still snow regularly fluffing up the ground when I pulled out my seed starter this past winter. I enlisted my kids to extract seeds from little packages with technicolor images, and I was a little giddy with the vivid pictures in my head of a blooming porch and deck. For more than a month, my little sunroom was overtaken by pots, sitting there like kids waiting for summer vacation.
So I have a teenager, and another just about. Most of me is tickled pink about all the real conversations we get to hold, all the fun we have as a maturing family, all the crazy jokes they tell me that leave all of us laughing.
So I had a major triumph last week–one I hope to share with you soon. Because it was AWESOME. I talked with friends on the phone out in the sunshine, skipping a little. It’s kind of one of those Who am I, and what is my family? moments, I told them–because that’s what David said when he was over the moon with God’s kindness (2 Samuel 7:18). It was good news I’d been working toward for about 14 years.
It was late, and she was crying now. Her marriage had been hard–hard for a long time.
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
