Post-travel prayer

We’ve been travelling – that great American rite of passage called The College Tour.  Nine days, seven states, five schools.

While we were away, I was reading a book called Imagine, by Jonah Lehrer, in which the author asserts that travel fosters creativity.  I think he meant a different kind of travel, because creativity wasn’t happening for me on this trip. I had intended to write witty blog posts all along the way, but somehow driving several hours and then cramming the Common Household into one hotel room negated any creativity that the travel should have engendered. 

On every tour we heard a statement like this:  “If you have an idea, just talk to your professor about it, and you can get (choose one) a research project / a research grant / a job / an internship / the Nobel prize.”  Maybe it was all that optimistic talk of ideas emerging from undergraduate brains that killed my middle-aged brain’s ideas.

Travel did not prevent me from praying.  Every night I was grateful to God to have arrived safely at our destination.   When we arrived home two days ago, this was part of my prayer:

Thank you, God, for bringing us home safely.  Thank you that when we were on a one-way street but didn’t know it, and we turned left from the middle lane (thinking that it was the left lane), the car on the left came whizzing past well before my husband made the turn instead of during our turn. 

Thank you that my husband didn’t leave my by the side of the road when I navigated him onto the highway in the wrong direction, putting us squarely in a traffic jam that added an extra 45 minutes to our trip.  Thank you that I did not leave my husband by the side of the road when he encouraged me to follow the GPS when it said “Stay to the left” instead of following the prominent road sign which said, “Go right” to go directly to our destination, a move which took us an extra two hours of driving, and through two states we didn’t intend to see.  Thank you that the kids got mostly got along with each other so that we weren’t tempted to leave them by the side of the road.

I’ve been quite angry at God about Parkinson’s but quite grateful about making it back home without any one of us being left behind.

More soon about our tours, but I just have to ask if anybody is grateful about anything, or if anybody out there prays in paragraphs.  ??