Every year my family and I go camping for a week. It’s full of challenges, cooperation and perspective shifts. This year we had a relatively jarring experience. Long story short, my daughter and I were biking to a park near our campsite and she took a spill. Not one of those spills where you kiss the booboo, put a hero bandage on it, tap them on the butt and send them back out in the world, but one of those spills that gets you five stitches and knocks out four teeth. By the grace of God that’s all that happened, and we appreciate the hospital and pediatric dentist that were incredible to our family. 

The beautiful part of this experience is how much our daughter taught me.

*Insert sarcastic “shocker” here. *

After her visits to the ER and dentist we asked her if she wanted to go back to camping. Her head turned a bit sideways and she answered a confident. “Yea.” Lightbulb! She had no inclination that this “traumatic” event had just happened to her. Simply, an event, in her day had happened. I want more of this acceptance in my life.

And, get this, after the ER and before the dentist my daughter asked me about her bike. We told her that we put it back in the garage. She started to cry and said to us, “but I wanted it at camping!” 

Uhhhhhh what?!?! Is all I could think. She had no intention of putting her bike riding on hold.

Where am I throwing my hands up after a failure and saying, “Nope, too painful. I’m going to put that away.”

Thank you perspective for the slap in the face. Now let’s pull those metaphorical bicycles out of the garage and get going.