God's Provision

First off, I will tell you to go watch this video.  Pastor Morris says most of the spiritual stuff way better than I can.  Mr. P and I watched this sermon a couple of weeks ago, and true to God's loving nature, we (read: I) had a pop quiz this weekend on our family vacation to Branson.  My family goes there every other year or so before Thanksgiving to do a big Thanksgiving/Christmas celebration before the holiday chaos begins.

We arrived in Branson on Thursday afternoon.  We had tickets to see "Joseph" at the Sight and Sound Theater at 3:30 (highly recommend the show.  It was fantastic) so we went straight there with the intention of checking into our hotel after the show.

Background: We signed up for this hotel thing through Bass Pro for a timeshare thingamajig at Big Cedar Lodge.  BCL is probably the most gorgeous resort in the Branson area, but basically, we paid for the equivalent of 1/2 a night's hotel stay for a 4 day/3 night stay.  We did the presentation and such and it was really pretty cool.  Anyways, back to my pop quiz

We get to the hotel around 7pm to check in and get back to my parents' cabin for Thanksgiving dinner.  But wait.  They are totally full and don't have our room.  Even though we booked in February.  We are shuffled next door to another hotel.  Get checked in to a not-quite-as-nice hotel then go to Thanksgiving.  I'm not happy.  Not at all.  Not that our original hotel was awesome or anything, it didn't have free breakfast, or a fridge and micro in the rooms, but it had a nice heated pool and it was just a generally nicer hotel.

Being the frugal farm-wife that I am, I had packed breakfast and lunch provisions to save money so really, in hindsight, my whole attitude problem was that my apple cart had been rocked.  It was stressful because we had to check out of the hotel by 9am the following morning to make it to the BCL presentation thing-y on time.  That, with three young children, might as well have been 3am in my mind.

We had dinner, made it back to the hotel to get the kids in bed so we could manage to get up in time in the morning.  Lo, and behold, Mr. P found out that they offer a full hot breakfast.  Small win!  I won't have to try to coordinate breakfast in our little hotel room.

We get up to the room and it's really pretty nice.  Newly remodeled has a HUGE tv (not that we turned it on, no time) and a micro and fridge.  Another small win.

Morning comes, we gather the heathens, ahem, children, get down to breakfast where we were the youngest adults by about 30 years and of course our children were the most adorable children to grace God's earth so they were loved on by every grandparent in the (crowded) room.  I think it brought joy to all parties.

 Plus, they had an automatic pancake maker.  An automatic pancake maker. It's like a pizza oven, but it has batter in it and it cooks the pancakes, 2 at a time, in about a minute.  My life will not be complete until I have one of these.  Pancake Saturdays are crazy in my house.  I need one.  Seriously.  Even Mr. P, my ever-practical husband, looked it up to see if we could get one.  He agreed that it would enrich everyone's life in our home :)

So, breakfast was eaten, everyone was loaded up along with the luggage and we headed to our thing-y.  They had a kids room for R so she played, colored, and watched movies the whole time.  B stayed with us and colored.  And D was her usual adorable self.  During the presentation, a manager came over and apologized for the hotel snafu and told us that we were back at our original (booked) hotel and we had been upgraded to a suite for the remaining two nights.  Suite?  Sweet!  The kids had their own room so Mr. P and I could stay up past 8:30!  Another pretty big win. Plus, they said our room would be ready when we went back to town, so we didn't have to drive around for the rest of the day with our luggage.  Yay!

We got back to the hotel, checked in again, and were directed to the locked top floor.  The Suite wasn't super fancy, but it had a balcony so the kids could run around on that and not disturb the downstairs neighbors.  We had nap time, pool time, and tv time all afternoon.  When we came back from the pool, we found a note with another apology from the hotel and 4 breakfast vouchers for their restaurant.  Wow.

That's when it hit me.  God basically hit me over the head and said, "See?"  I got so bent out of shape because my path wasn't working out, but God had a much better plan in mind.  A silly minor inconvenience of checking in and out of our hotel an extra time and he provided a huge room and breakfast for the two mornings I was going to have to prepare breakfast for us.  He blessed us.  He gave us daily provisions, he only asked me to trust Him.  And I failed miserably.  My sweet husband was a rock star.  He is the one that will always tell me, "Don't worry about it, there's nothing you can do.  It'll all work out, no matter what."

I'm slightly embarrassed to write this.  But I hope you will listen to Pastor Robert's message and see that God really wants us (me) to look to him daily for his provision.  Had I been focused more on trusting him than my silly plan, I would not have had such a horrible attitude about it on Thursday night.  God is so good to me, even when I fail.