An amazing, too-good-to-be-true, busy, relaxing week

After a brutal 2013 (way too many deadlines and too much travel), our family was really REALLY looking forward to the working vacation we had this past week. Jeff and I had a speaking engagement on a week long marriage cruise to the Caribbean.  (Suffering for Jesus.)   We brought the kids with us, spoke several times, listened to Dr. Kevin Lehman (the other speaker) and the amazing music of Todd Agnew and Sara Groves each morning and evening, ate way more amazing food than we should have, explored old San Juan in Puerto Rico, were beach bums in St. Thomas and St. Maarten, and made many new friends.  It was quite difficult to believe that this was all really happening, actually!   What an amazing gift, after such a hard year.

Two weeks ago, as you all know, Atlanta was the laughingstock of the country with its reaction to two inches of snow and ice (yes, I can still hear you snickering at us).  The day before we headed out for the cruise it snowed again.  We went from snow to surf within thirty six hours — and boy was that a welcome change!

We spent great time together as a family, and even managed to keep the kids on track with an hour or two of schoolwork each day (much to their disgust!).  We had blocks of “work time” where we would all sit in a beautiful area of the ship, and Jeff and I would do our work and the kids would do theirs.  It was kind of funny how many people would walk nearby and look shocked and say “Homework??! You’re making them do HOMEWORK??”    Yep, that was the deal to allow them to miss school for a week!

During those ‘work times’ it was always quite difficult and expensive for me and Jeff to connect to our email but this is a key time for Jeff’s business and my next book is about to go to press, so we had to figure out ways to do it.  (I know I have all your sympathy for having to work in such a tough environment.)

But we were also always really careful about protecting this as a true vacation.  We explored the amazing ship (The Celebrity Reflection, the newest ship in the Celebrity fleet!), hung out with others in our group (organized by ChristianCruises.net, which did a FANTASTIC job), played games, went by the ice cream station just because we could (shhh….), sat in the hot tub, swam in the pool, read several ‘beach read’ novels in the sun, did Zumba on deck in flip flops (I’ll never do THAT again) and just enjoyed a complete break from normal life.

And the whole time we said to each other “Can you BELIEVE we get to do this?”

I’ve spoken on quite a few cruises before, but now that the kids are old enough to explore the ship on their own and hang out with their friends sometimes, this was the first cruise where Jeff and I and the kids all enjoyed the cruise equally, I think.  It was a sweet, sweet gift from God after a tough year.

And now…. refreshed…. we press forward into the next busy season!