Italy: A story in pictures

When you travel 24 hours and your guts are all twisted because your kids are alive 24 hours away from you and you may not be able to bear this, and then you drink a cappuccino with a “standing breakfast” and walk outside and this is what says hello…

and walking paths look like this…

and this is the view out your window in the Tuscany morning.

When your traveling companions are seriously this AWESOME….

and you walk with a dearest friend down a sidewalk in Rome… 

When you sit with friends over wine or over pasta or both, meal after meal, and every time the conversation is richer and deeper and  encouraging and full of laughter you feel like God is so glad to have given them to you…

When you eat pizza in Rome in a plaza and you can’t stand how much you love it…

and when your last night in Italy is spent in a cute dress on a stone step at one am, facing a building 2,000 years your senior…

and you think how much beauty there is in the great big world, how much goodness God holds out: in the friendships and the pathways, in the morning light and in the ancient stone built by ancient people. In the frescoes and in the icons and in the living color of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. And every where God is whispering goodness.

* * *

So when you get home bone tired and you pack the suitcases and the toys and you sit with your little boys and snuggle extra and long. You pack the car and get on to the airplane for a new city, this time with your children in tow, and you hear those old stones whispering a secret you haven’t processed yet. And the boys both fall asleep on you and you lay your head on your husband’s shoulder and wait for the secret to arrive.