How many miles?

We recently made a trip out to Boise area to visit Whit's brother Haven and his family. On the way out, Eli (who is three years old) asked, "Mom, how many miles is it to Uncle Haven's house?"

Now, for those of you not familiar with a three year old mentality, he doesn't really understand what a mile is. If you are an adult, you have walked many miles, and probably driven many more. You understand basic concepts such as a mile can take you 20 minutes to walk if you're moving slow or uphill, as little as 4 minutes to run if you are in GREAT shape, and less than a minute to drive if you're on a highway.

Adults also have a basic concept of numbers, having seen a few years themselves, and understanding that years are composed of several months, hundreds of days, thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of minutes and probably millions of seconds. Eli, at three, doesn't really know how to count past twenty. He recently identified my age as "ten and ten and ten" (I am thirty) and then suggested that the cemetery we passed on Memorial Day had about ten and ten and ten flags. It had closer to two or three hundred flags. So, to a three year old, there isn't much difference between 30 and 300.

In spite of my understanding that Eli's conceptual ability to process the number of miles to Uncle Haven's house was limited, I still said, "Oh, about 400 or so." Eli said, "Oh, okay."

About five minutes later, Eli asked, "Mom, how many miles now?"

I patiently explained, "Eli, 400 miles will take a long time. The sun came up an hour ago. You know how we usually take naps after lunch? Well, we will drive for the whole morning, then drive through a fast food place and buy lunch. Then we will drive the whole time we would usually take naps. Then we will drive even more--about two more movies worth of driving. When it's almost dark... then we will get there. That's how long it will take."

About two minutes later, Eli asked, "Mom, how many miles is it now?"

About 15 minutes, or six more repetitions of the same question later, my head exploded. Three hours later my patience was way past gone with answering his sweet little voice when he said, "Mom, now how many more miles? Are we almost there now?"

About halfway through the trip something occurred to me. Before I can share my epiphany I should explain something about my life. My family moved out to Oregon a year ago. We thought it was the perfect place for us. Unfortunately, we felt a little isolated and lonely without family here and a few things didn't work out quite as we had envisioned. We had optimistically purchased a beautiful home. My husband was lucky enough to find a great job out in Houston, right by my parents and brother's family. It even paid better. All of that meant that we now needed to sell our house, the one we had just bought and sunk all our money into. Selling a home a year after purchasing it is never a winning proposition, with closing costs on both ends, but selling a home out here had an additional challenge--the market was way down.

Over the past month and a half, I had been diligently praying to my father in heaven every morning, over every meal, and every night. Sometimes when I had a free minute I'd say a prayer intermittently throughout the day. Many components of my prayers changed, but there was one underlying request. Please help us to sell our house now. We are ready to sell our house and move, so please let us find some buyers and be able to sell it for what we paid.

It occurred to me on the long drive that I was much like my three year old son. A perfect example of my similar behavior came in the prayers I was consistently sending up to my Heavenly Father that we sell our house. I wasn't trying to understand how many miles it had been. I was merely asking, over and over, how many miles. And asking him if I could be there now. Not in a few hours, or a few miles, but now.

There are so many things in our lives that we don't understand. Sometimes it's that we lack the capacity. Sometimes we lack the faith or patience. In my case it was probably a bit of both. I lacked the understanding of how God was working in my life and the faith that He would take care of me as he saw fit. I just kept asking over and over and over for the total miles left, but I didn't listen to his response when it was sent. I had repeatedly felt that things would work out--that if I had some faith, we would sell our house. I had even told my husband that I felt sure we would sell it and things would work out. As the days passed, that faith faded, and fear replaced it and my litany began anew. "How many miles left, Lord?"

We have since sold the house, and we sold it at a perfect time--we had a place to live the entire time we needed to be here in Oregon and sold it just in time to move out to our new house. We didn't have double mortgage payments and we didn't even have to write a check to get out of our house in Oregon. The more important thing is that I finally placed my trust in the Lord. I stopped asking how many miles and trusted in Him to get me safely where I needed to go. It is my prayer that I can do better in the future to listen and understand my Heavenly Father's promptings and that I can have the faith to be patient when I can't understand.