Unexpected blessings today

Today David and I had an unusual mid-week middle-of the-day date. School "babysat" the kids while we went to get our passports renewed (David took the morning off school). It took an hour to get there by train, but only one change. Mind you we were squished like sardines for a portion of this journey, I felt my pelvis creak with the pressure, or was it someone else's? I can't remember—we were close.

The bit at the embassy only took a short while. It was such a small thing, less work than enrolling your child in a new school! So we're finished by 10.15 and able to make our leisurely way back to work via two coffee shops (one for a mid-morning snack and coffee, and the other for lunch).

It was a delightful, almost spontaneous date. Time to stop and breath in what currently feels like a life that is spent racing from one thing to the next with barely enough time to enjoy the sunshine.

It also gave me a shock to reflect that this marks 20 years since I started preparing to go overseas for the first time. During my time in university I went on a missions trip to Indonesia (so now you know approximately how old I'm turning this year). In fact that was the time that David and I really met (though we'd been a part of a large group of Christian students prior to this, we hadn't really known who each other was). Anyway, that's another story. However, we both got our passports in the same year, preparing for the same trip overseas, so that now, 20 years later, we can renew our passports at the same time! Plus we have a great shared history that goes back more than five years before we were married.

Lots of blessings that I'm thankful for today. Not to mention a wonderfully warm day (about 8) with sunshine and hardly any wind, so we could eat lunch outside the smoky coffee shop in comfort.