Friends welcome back to the ransom tarp Podcast in the studio today, John Eldridge and Craig McConnell.

I think most of our listeners over the years are aware that Craig has been in a five-year cage fight with leukemia.

And we've had some highs and we've had some lows and there's been an awful lot of lows over those five years and those of you who have been through chemo, it's just brutal.

And so over the course of those years,

Craig and Laurie have lost a number of vacations,

vacation time, time with the kids, and the good news is Craig's doing better this year. Craig's feeling better.

Thank God. You got a vacation yes oh done yeah transcendent it was

wonderful it was everything our bodies, our hearts, our spirit and soul needed.

Some friends advised to go sailing with them and we were sailing in the Caribbean and

it really had so little to do with sailing actually it was all about just sleeping with the convertible top down and looking at the

stars and rain squalls at night in the tropic air and warm salty water floating like a turtle if you could picture that.

You were the sea turtle? Yes, yeah, just floating and but just just life coming back and joy and just savoring and lingering and beauty. Oh John it was it was like heaven. Was heaven on earth was what it was and it just so refreshing.

Oh, especially after so much, just physical affliction and then soul, you know, soul affliction

to be in beauty, to be in rest, to be out on the ocean.

You know and it feels like those moments are so rare and yet when you're really in that sweet spot of just being

renewed in the presence of God and the beauty it's like that's what we were designed for isn't it yeah

yeah friends I think that if you'll flip back through your the photo album of your memory that there are those

moments yeah there are those moments I'm just thinking of some family dinners

we had last summer out on the deck, candle light, moonlight, conversation, laughter

storytelling, just rare, rare moments with the family and our adult children and oh gosh those are the kinds of

moments that you just wish would go on forever, you know, and something in you just goes, I'm home, like I found it.

Like this is a taste of what I was meant for.

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