This afternoon my daughter called me from college to tell me she was coming home to spend the weekend with us.\u00a0 I was super excited until she said \u201cYeah, and Dad is taking us repelling tonight\u201d.\u00a0 WHAT?!\u00a0 Repelling??\u00a0 That thing where you dangle from the edge of a cliff with nothing but a clip attaching you to a rope that may or may not be anchored safely to a rock that could crumble at any moment sending you crashing down to certain death??? That kind of repelling!?!?<\/p>\n
Now the interesting part of the story is the fact that earlier in the day my husband said he was going to go \u201chiking\u201d with the kids\u2026.Hiking is a heck of a lot different than repelling!!! So, yeah, my husband has some splainin\u2019 to do on that one!!<\/p>\n
So early evening my daughter and son arrive home and immediately the three of them head out the door to go repelling. And there was not a thing I could do to stop them.\u00a0 Given that my husband had already promised to take them,\u00a0if I would have said they couldn\u2019t go then that would have made me the bad parent who never lets them have any fun.\u00a0 And given that my kids are both over 18 and technically adults (I say technically because any parent of children 18 and 21 knows that it is extremely difficult to think of your children as actual adults yet \u2013 heck my 21 year old son runs around in Sponge Bob Square Pants Pajama Bottoms with a Batman T-shirt still!)\u00a0 But given that they are technical adults, I can\u2019t really dictate what they can and can\u2019t do anymore, so I had to stand by and watch them pull away.<\/p>\n
Then I went to my room and proceeded to give myself the pep talk \u2013 \u201cAmy it does no good to worry\u2026that won\u2019t change anything\u2026heck you have written tons of blogs on this very topic so you have to live by your own advice!\u201d\u00a0 Which worked for the first few hours until it got dark outside\u2026not just kind of dark out\u2026pitch black dark out and still no garage door opening signaling they are home.\u00a0 Still there is nothing I can really do but wait at this point.\u00a0 And that\u2019s when I realized that sometimes you just gotta cross your fingers and say a prayer that everything will turn out okay, because frankly there just isn\u2019t anything else you can do.\u00a0 You have to recognize that some things are just out of your ability to control or change.\u00a0 But two things you can always do are – cross your fingers, and then get on your knees and say a prayer.\u00a0 The prayer part is the one that helps me the most.\u00a0 It\u2019s when you reach that point that you have no other option than to turn it over to God and let him be in charge from here.\u00a0 Then trust Him that whatever happens He is in charge. \u00a0It\u2019s not always easy to have faith in that\u2026especially when it is pitch black outside and still no garage door is opening\u2026but what are your options? You can be scared and afraid, or you can have faith and believe.\u00a0 Being scared and afraid is pretty miserable.\u00a0 Having faith and believing feels a heck of a lot better, and of those two options it\u2019s the only option that might just make a difference in the outcome.<\/p>\n
I believe God answers prayers.\u00a0 Maybe not immediately, and maybe not in the way we wanted Him to, but He always answers us in the way that will ultimately be for our best good, of that I am certain.<\/p>\n
I suppose the message tonight is this \u2013 when life gets hard and you are worried or stressed or scared\u2026cross your fingers and say a prayer\u2026then have faith it is all going to be okay in the end\u2026and if it\u2019s not okay then it\u2019s not the end \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
That\u2019s my phone! They are down the mountain safe and coming home!!! Prayer works people!\u00a0 Prayer works!!!\u00a0 Have an incredible day!\u00a0 And smile!\u00a0 It\u2019s the weekend!!<\/p>\n
~Amy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This afternoon my daughter called me from college to tell me she was coming home to spend the weekend with us.\u00a0 I was super excited until she said \u201cYeah, and Dad is taking us repelling tonight\u201d.\u00a0 WHAT?!\u00a0 Repelling??\u00a0 That thing where you dangle from the edge of a cliff with nothing but a clip attaching […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4615,168,626,1375,3782,174,101,46,5138,449,368,63,240,5135,1145,179,4492,5141,178,93,7,30,29,65,1566,231,12,629,5140,35,53,1482,349,5139,1665,576,88,5136,1410,845,112,81,5137,275,84,133,173],"class_list":["post-5070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-adults","tag-adversity","tag-advise","tag-afraid","tag-answers","tag-anxiety","tag-ashley","tag-attitude","tag-batman","tag-be-happy","tag-believe","tag-blessings","tag-children","tag-climbing","tag-college","tag-dalton","tag-delay","tag-denial","tag-faith","tag-fear","tag-future","tag-gift","tag-god","tag-gratitude","tag-hiking","tag-hope","tag-husband","tag-inspiration","tag-its-not-the-end","tag-love","tag-motivation","tag-outcome","tag-peace","tag-pep-talk","tag-pray","tag-prayer","tag-pressure","tag-repelling","tag-safety","tag-scared","tag-self-improvement","tag-smile","tag-sponge-bob","tag-stress","tag-trust","tag-weekend","tag-worry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5070"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5073,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5070\/revisions\/5073"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}