God is Everywhere
For 20-plus years, my family has vacationed on the Guadalupe River, which has become something like a small slice of heaven, and it is an annual trip we look forward to with great anticipation. To be exact, we are between the third and fourth crossings of the river in the very small town of Sattler, the kind of small town that if you blink twice, you will miss it! My mother-in-law began our love of this spot in 1999 as a way to have all her children and grandchildren together for a week. Beginning in 2004, my family took over renting the house first for a week, then the vacation extended to two weeks when we would find ourselves crying at the thought of leaving this peaceful place.
There is nothing spectacular about the house; it is a basic two-bedroom home with an addition behind the carport, which was ideal for stowing away all the teenagers who magically showed up when our girls were in high school and college. In fact, none of the houses along the river have any outstanding features on the street side; it is the back of the houses that face the river that take your breath away with their wide decks, plate glass windows that span the width of the house and the sloping lawns that end at the riverbank.
The real beauty lies in the slower pace of life and in absorbing the still glass-like surface of the river, watching turtles poke their heads out of the water or clamber onto the rocks to warm themselves in the sun and in coming around the bend of the river to see a towering slab of limestone rise majestically toward the sky. It is during these moments that I realize God is indeed everywhere. He is visible in the giant cypress trees that line the banks of the river, in the dragonflies that land on my knees while floating, in the fireflies that light up and dance around the yard at night, in the deer and raccoons that silently show up in the empty lot next to ours when it is dark and in the wind that gently ripples the surface of the water. Sometimes, God puts Himself in a specific spot, as observed by my five-year-old grandson. One afternoon, the wind started blowing our tubes in the opposite direction when my grandson piped up and said, “That’s God - right now he is behind us blowing us back toward the house.” God is all around us and God always has our back.
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