Random Late Night Thoughts, (or maybe I shouldn't have had the cheesecake for dessert after all!)

(Craig writes) Still in central Florida enjoying a fun vacation at WDW. Went to the Captain's Table restaurant at the Yacht Club for dinner tonight. Nice place, great food and glitzy atmosphere, has an almost "other worldly" feel to it. Kind of feel guilty having a steak dinner in a plush place and at the same time being aware of the thousands of folks trying to recover from the recent devastating floods in several places in the USA who are working hard to just survive on a daily basis. I am also reminded that we were at WDW when hurricane Katrina hit and flooded New Orleans and other places. We ended up going down to NOLA help out with the relief efforts then and that was a huge catalyst to moving us along in our "new thinking". While enjoying the R&R we currently have going on in Fla. we have also been thinking/talking/praying a lot about how to use our time now and our upcoming coast to coast trip to plan for our future involvements. We gave up on planning to be financially set by the time we retired in the traditional sense and have opted instead to work on lowering our financial needs, and our accumulation of "stuff", to the place where we have the freedom and mobility to go when & where we can be used by God to help make a difference. One of our Faith Heros/Heroines is the late, great Mother Theresa who made the statement, "when God calls you to go somewhere and it takes you longer than 15 minutes to pack, you have too much stuff." Just when we think we have divested ourselves of "excess stuff" we are put in a position to see where we can cut back some more and live even more simply. Admittedly, some things were easier to let go of than others and while certainly not martyrs or signing up for a life of poverty we have discovered the tremendous freedom that simplicity brings. We have also met some very interesting people in the process. We came across a rather strong statement in one of the books we read recently. The author suggested that "if you want your kids to live the traditional American dream then don't introduce them to Jesus!" (His ways are drastically different).

Our current lifestyle thoughts are running along the lines of traveling around the USA looking for places/people we can connect with. Then stopping off to live there for a while to see what we can learn, share or help out with. Becky asked me today "if I thought that people would think we were crazy if we did something like that?" I responded "too late, we've already blown our cover!"

There used to be an old TV show about a guy who rode around the US on a motorcycle stopping here and there to help out different people. He would ride into a town, hang around for a while, do some great thing for someone or some community and then ride off into the sunset looking for the next place to do it again. Back then I thought the story line was really cheesy and dumb but lately...