My
friend, Andrea Lemke-Rochon, is the youngest of five sisters whose ages span 17
years. This past spring, for the first time since she was an infant, Andrea
spent a week with them—the five were invited by their aunt to be guests at her
timeshare in the Bahamas. While the
setting was gorgeous and the weather was perfect, what was most significant for
Andrea was the uninterrupted time the five had together.
“We
all agreed to unplug for the week, so we wouldn’t have distractions,” Andrea
said. “We had no phones; we ate together; we sat on the beach and looked at the
water; we spent time with each other. It was lovely.”
While
ads for vacation destinations may lead us to believe that the perfect vacation
is all about choosing the right place, the truth is that the value of a
vacation has less to do with the sights we see and more to do with the people
we see those sights with. The root “vac” in “vacation” means “to empty.” At its
core, a vacation is an opportunity for us to empty ourselves of our regular
responsibilities. In their absence, we can better be present to those who we
are vacationing with.
A vacation, done
well, gives us the time and the space to connect more deeply with each
other. That connection can be completely
non-verbal—a shared experience of jumping in the waves or flying down a
rollercoaster drop. It can include learning something together—a history tour
or museum visit. And a good vacation doesn’t
have to be one hundred percent cheerful fun; it can include an afternoon for an
important, but difficult conversation. In planning a vacation, a more important
question than “Where do we want to go?” is “How will we connect with each other?”
Connecting with Immediate Family:
Soheil and Lisa,
Badran, parents of three daughters, have noticed that their vacation stories hold
a more solid place in family lore than other memories. “Whether it’s collecting
sand dollars on the beach or finding that ice cream shop on a hot day, it’s the
memories from vacations that always come up during family dinners,” Soheil
said.
Again,
the idea of “emptying” plays its part in family vacation. As much as parents
may need to escape work, kids need a break from the pressures of school, extra-curriculars
and friendship drama.
“We went to a dude ranch in the middle of
Colorado last summer,” said Emma Gillette, mother of three grade school kids.
“No internet, no WiFi, no TV, no screens at all. It was amazing – it was a real
‘reset button’ for our family, and has made me reconsider what kind
of vacations we'll take going forward.”
The Power of Extended Family:
The
advent of transportation and technology has led to more families scattering,
with grandparents, aunts and uncles not as involved in a child’s day-to-day
life. Vacationing with extended family
gives children the opportunity to become close to those they don’t see
regularly. My uncle Mark, a father of five adult children, settled with his
family in Nebraska in the 1970s, having grown up in Chicago and Milwaukee. Each
summer, when I was young, the Scobey side of the family would get together at a
reunion picnic in Chicago, at my aunt and uncle’s home on Crescent Lake, near
Rhinelander, or at our family’s home in Whitefish Bay — this was the only time
I saw my Nebraska cousins. “Through these trips, our kids gained an understanding the people who shaped my life over
the years,” Uncle Mark explained. “It was a chance for them to see physical
differences and similarities of relatives, and how locations where their
relatives lived were similar to or different from their own home.”
Connecting with God’s Grace
It is easier
to feel the grace of God when we are present to the moment. For Andrea, who
took the trip to the Bahamas with sisters, a moment of God’s grace was found in
a jewelry shop with her oldest sister, Kathy, who had recently lost her
husband.
“It would
have been Kathy and Ray’s fiftieth anniversary this year, and Kathy wanted to
find a piece of jewelry to commemorate that,” Andrea said.
Kathy and Ray had spent their married life in the
town of Aurora, Wisconsin, named after the Aurora Borealis, also known as the
Northern Lights. “As Kathy browsed in the little jewelry shop, she found a
beautiful ring and noticed that the line of jewelry was called Aurora Borealis,
because the stones in the line had the same colors as the Northern lights. We
just stood in the jewelry shop and cried together. God was in that moment.”
As the first
whiffs of warm weather hit, and Bill and I look toward the summer and plan time
with our family, the wisdom of all these stories of the good vacations stay
with us, reminding us we don’t need an exotic location or luxury accommodations.
What we need is simply time away. Time for our family to “vacate” — to empty
ourselves, so as to refill with love.
