Cancer Musings (The Anniversary Trip)

I marvel at God's timing in everything. His plans and His timing are always better than mine, though I may not realize that initially. Greg and I will celebrate our 29th wedding anniversary on the 28th of this month. We usually take the week after Christmas off of work and plan a trip of some sort for our anniversary, sometimes a big trip, sometimes just a day trip. This year, we decided in October (before a cancer diagnosis was in existence) that we would use up our airline miles credit from our canceled Disney trip in March of 2020 (we all remember what was happening in the world at that time) and take a short trip in December. The credit was set to expire at the end of this year. Of course, it will make sense to everyone that we chose beautiful, sunny Aurora, Illinois (in December) as our exotic location to visit. I had been wanting to go to the Operation Christmas Child processing center there and work a shift processing shoeboxes that will be sent to other countries all around the world. Greg is a good sport about such things but his personality is a little more suited to dropping me off at the processing center for a shift and driving around Illinois playing Ingris, a GPS-based game that he loves and is way over my head. Since, we were working around the schedule of the OPCC processing center, the trip was scheduled a little earlier in the month than our anniversary. With the decision made, we booked two First Class tickets to Chicago (our credit was enough to be extravagant) where we would rent a car and drive the 45 minutes to Aurora December 5-7. 

We had a great time! As I mentioned above, God's timing is perfect and He knew things we didn't know. I mentioned in a previous post that I had made a very quick decision to get my hair cut on a Monday evening. What I did not mention was that it was the night before we left on our trip. I was still dealing with a little regret from that decision, so it was nice for me to leave town right away and process that decision and work it out amongst strangers. As I boarded the plane and as we drove around Illinois and met various people, no one knew my hair had been 7 inches longer the day before, and no one cared, which was exactly what I needed. No one knew I was diagnosed with cancer and would be starting chemo in a week. The anonymity gave me a chance to relax and process things for myself.  

Operation Christmas Child Processing Center

The boxes we processed that day were being sent to South America. We processed over 20,000 boxes in the 4-hour shift that I was there. I was on the inspection line, my favorite part. I got to go through the boxes and make sure they didn't have any liquids or food packed in them and remove those items if found. It's a fun job because you get a lot of ideas on how to (and not to) pack your own boxes in the future. 

Since our wedding anniversary is so close to Christmas, a tradition on our anniversary trips has always been to drive around and look at the Christmas light displays. This trip was earlier than usual, but we still managed to find several displays up and running. 

Who doesn't love a big teddy bear just sitting at the top of the steps of a public building in the downtown square? It just begs "take your picture with me".

We are very grateful for this short trip away and we enjoyed it immensely.