Yesterday my fiance and I were driving out to Youthfront Camp West for a fun filled day of paintball supervising. Well, he was paintball supervising and I was hang out supervising. What?
Anyway...we got off at exit 202 and there was a sign there that read, "HUGE Garage Sale This Way!!" Then it provided some nice arrows just to get us going in the right direction. This sign was of interest to us because Alan and I will be moving into a place of our own soon and we are a little short on the dough, if you know what I mean. I felt good about this particular sign because it did say HUGE sale and most of the houses out in this country like setting were pretty sweet. Sweet houses=sweet stuff to sell at garage sales.
I ran into Alan right in the middle of my 'hanging out time' at camp and he kindly reminded me to go check out the HUGE sale. Around 4pm my friend Alli and I decided to venture out and find the HUGE sale. I was pretty excited. The whole way there I was dreaming of all the wonderful things I would find there and trying to figure out how I would get them back home. As we ventured down the road we passed some big beautiful houses and I knew we'd hit the jackpot. Signs directing us to the HUGE sale kept coming..."Keep going!", "This Way!", "You're Getting Closer!" Our anticipation mounted.
We eventually reached a stop sign and in front of us were now two signs. One that again pointed us onward to this HUGE sale and another that said, "Dead End." We soon realized that this road dead-ended right into the driveway of this HUGE sale. We were in a bit of an awkward situation because we couldn't pull the ol' "drive by and if it sucks just keep going" trick. Nope, if we went forward we had to commit to getting out of the car and checking out this HUGE sale. Well, right when we pulled up we knew that this was a mistake, but the kids had already spotted us and gone in to tell mom and dad that they had costumers. Here is what we saw at the HUGE sale: one small rack of really old clothes and a couple tables with really small worthless items on them. I was so disappointed at what the word HUGE turned out to mean. So, we spoke a few words to the family and made a two courtesy laps around the HUGE sale, knowing that there was no effing way we would ever buy anything. Then we had to figure out an escape route. Alli handled our exit beautifully. We began walking towards the car, she looked at the family, waved and said, "Thank you!" It was beautiful. On the way out we passed another car on its way to the HUGE sale and we considered waving her off, but could see that dreamy, hopeful look in her eyes and we just couldn't be the ones to crush her garage sale-ing dreams. Hope she didn't make a special drive out for that one.
In conclusion, we may not have come away from the HUGE sale with anything to write home about, but not all was lost. I got to ride in Alli's new car, Alli got to drive her new car, we saw some lovely sights, had some good laughs, and ended up with a pretty decent story. If I wouldn't have gone to check out the HUGE sale for myself I would have still been dreaming up all of the possible items they had that I missed out on. The lesson learned? If God presents you with a very clear sign that says, "Dead End" take it literally and save yourself some gas.
1 year ago
