Festival of Booths

As I alluded to in my previous post, we went camping over Columbus Day weekend with two very special couples. Unfortunately, I don't have a group picture, but I do have a few others to share. It was an awesome couple of days!

When we went, we had just blown through a whirlwind of interviews which made for a lot of traveling and late nights. As we were preparing to drive down (to Palmyra, MO), Ryan was feeling a bit melancholy about more driving and more "doing", but, it turned out to be the perfect get-away. We had no set agenda, just time to relax and enjoy good friends and good food. The Lord has blessed us so richly with good friends!

Abe loved the tent and really, the entire camping experience. After we set the tent up the first night, he just ran all around inside, laughing. I can imagine that it must have been huge and so much fun to someone his size. He didn't have any trouble going to sleep, and thankfully, the weather was very mild which made for a pleasant sleep as well.

We enjoyed beautiful scenery, waking up each morning to a view of the sun rising over the lake, with tall grasses and autumn trees surrounding the water. It was glorious! The lake contained a plentiful stock of fish, which Abram was absolutely enthralled by...he even helped me catch a 4-pounder!!






Here he is with the pint-sized fishing pole:




And here he is with his daddy:




Here he is munching on an apple with the Ober boys...I couldn't believe how much of it he ate all by himself! (We did have to rinse it off post-drop a few times :)





Now, you may be wondering why I titled the post "Festival of Booths". The reason the Luginbuhl's invited us out to camp for the weekend was to celebrate this festival, which historically, was held somewhere around this time of year. Luke and Angie gave a wonderful Bible study about all the different festivals, and for this campout, we focused particularly on the booths:

"On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the produce of the land, you shall celebrate the feast of the LORD seven days. On the first day shall be a solemn rest, and on the eighth day shall be a solemn rest. And you shall take on the first day the fruit of splendid trees, branches of palm trees and boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God seven days. You shall celebrate it as a feast to the LORD for seven days in the year. It is a statute forever throughout your generations; you shall celebrate it in the seventh month. You shall dwell in booths for seven days. All native Israelites shall dwell in booths, that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." Moses declared to the people of Israel the appointed feasts of the LORD.
Leviticus 23:39-44

While we didn't celebrate for 7 days, we did feast and live in booths (which means tents) for a few days, at least. We spent our evenings around the fire, after the kiddos were asleep, sharing about how the Lord brought us out of Egypt, our own Egypts. We shared about where we had been and how God had so graciously intervened and brought us out of our sin and even how he had brought us to our spouses. It was so special to hear things about our friends that we didn't know before. It was even more beautiful to honor God and praise Him for the work He had done. We forget to stop and think about that sometimes, don't we? We serve a good Father! It was truly a wonderful weekend.

We left a little earlier than the other couples so we could get home to Isaac's farewell party (Ryan's brother Isaac is in Haiti for several months--check out his blog if you're interested: http://www.pipesofdawn.blogspot.com). We got home in time to unpack and clean up a little before heading to the party, which was when the following video was taken (no one need know how ridiculous I looked in the background in order to get him to giggle so much!!):




Thanks for reading, see ya soon!