For the love of family

Here's hoping everyone had a wonderful holiday season. I know I did. I got to experience a rather rare and exciting thing over the break: returning home to family I had neglected for entirely too long. Here's the basic run down... Most of you know that my family is primarily in Oregon and that is where I generally head off to whenever I get a long enough break. However, the people in the Northwest only represent about half my family, my Mother's side to be exact. I have long been neglecting my Dad's side of the fam, most of whom live in Minnesota and North Dakota. Well I finally managed to work out some time to get back there because my cousin Nick, who is near my age and who I basically grew up with when I was younger, was getting married. Now it has been around 7 or 8 years since the last time I visited most of these people so I was more than a little nervous to say the least, but once I got there everything was just great! I had a blat catching up with all my family. Most of my cousins are barely recognizable (It's amazing how much a person changes from age 10 to age 17) and there was even a whole clutch of new cousins (and even a few neices and nephews) I hadn't even met!

It is really amazing how easy it can be to simply get busy with your life and routine and nearly forget a whole group of people that were once very important to you. And even after this long, everyone was so open and loving and just happy to have me back. Family is a very important part of everyday life to these people and it is so comforting to realize that in spite of my near criminal absence, none of them ever stopped loving and praying for me. It's as if I unwrapped a whole extra family for Christmas to add to the already incredibly important and loving one I already had. What better present is there?

Now as a result of this trip, and a few other exciting new things in my life (you know who you are), I find myself really lookng forward to this new year in a way I haven't done in quite some time. I can't wait to see what is going to happen next, and I am looking forward with a confidence that can only come when a person knows that they have the support of a loving family to back them up.

Happy New Year Everyone!