The Beach at Elephant Butte

Locally we have a lake that has a nice sandy beach.  We tried to take Jason there last weekend, but got rained out almost as soon as we got there.  We decided to try again today and Jason had a blast!  He loved playing in the sand and wanted to rush the waves.  After ingesting a bit too much of the sand we decided it was time to get up off the beach, but the only other thing we had to do was go sit back in the hotel room.  Instead we decided to fill up Jason's water table from the spicket at a local campground and let him play with that in the bed of the truck while we were still at the beach area. 

To avoid getting sand and water Jeff took his watch and wedding band off.  At first he set them nicely in the cab of the truck, but when we were playing in the water table he didn't want to get sand on his feet again so he tossed them in the open window thinking that they would both land on the passenger's seat...well his watch did.  We searched high and low for his wedding band.  We took everything out of the car, moved around seats and got out flashlights and still could not find his wedding band.  Finally after dinner Jeff took us back to the beach where we had been just in case the ring missed the window and fell in the sand.  We sifted and shuffled around the sand but eventually started looking in the truck again.  I'll admit it I was getting pretty tired of looking at this point and had kind of given up hope when I popped off one of the plastic parts of the seat and heard a small tinkle.  I know I had either broken the seat or had found his ring.  Sure enough there it was!!! 

We were buckling Jason in his seat (he had been such an angel by patiently waiting) when I heard Jeff say "is he stuck?"  Yup there was a guy down there stuck in the soft sand by the water.  So we drove down there and got out the tow cable that Jeff had gotten years ago, but never used hooked him up and pulled him to stiffer packed sand.  Growing up in the suburbs I had never towed another vehicle with a tow rope, so it was a little scary, but along the way I said to Jeff that God obviously wanted us to help this family.  Jeff told the guy so as he tried to thank him.  There was no reason that Jeff's ring should have been so difficult to find, there was no reason why we would have been out on the beach after Jason's bedtime and there was no reason I found the ring right as that guy discovered he was stuck.  God was watching out for him and us that day.

You could go away with the moral that you should never throw anything into the car and hope it will be somewhere you can find it OR you could go away with the fact that God has a plan for us even if we don't know what it is.  It may take enduring some hardship, but God is watching out for us.