2010 Providence Ladies' Tea

July 24, 2010 was one of those days of which memories are made.

Last year we very much enjoyed our time at the Providence Ladies' Tea down in Peoria, so we were really looking forward to attending again this year. We were excited to hear the speakers, among them Jasmine Baucham, whose blog we enjoy reading. We got up, donned our tea attire and were ready to drive the 2 1/2 hours to the banquet facility to have a nice, relaxing time of tea and encouragement.

God had other plans.

We were finishing up our quick breakfast, when the phone rings. It was Mr. McDonald. Jasmine was stranded at a hotel by the airport due to cancelled flights, and since we were the closest ones and were already coming to the tea anyway, he asked if we would bring her down. Of course we said yes, with the understanding that we'd probably be a 1/2 hour late (the tea started at 10:30 a.m.).

We arrived at the hotel, and there was no sign of Jasmine. We called her and found out that she thought we were picking her up at the airport so she had hopped on a bus over there. We hurried over to the airport and found her without a problem. We were all ready to cruise down to the tea, but 15 minutes into our drive we hit traffic. BAD traffic.

We sat. And sat. We called Dad to find out what was up; he said once we got past the toll booth we should be fine. We sat some more. We chatted about likes and dislikes, crying during movies, and shared stories, notably about Jasmine's experiences leading up to this - how she forgot her laptop (which contained her speech and her nearly-finished book manuscript), missed flights, had flights cancelled, and had to stay in a hotel alone where the receptionist loudly announced her room number in the presence of several creepy-looking men. The poor girl will never want to come to Chicago again!

We inched along and went a whopping 7 miles in approximately 3 hours.

As you can imagine, we were already late. :-)

We finally found out what was holding everyone up. Due to heavy rains and flash flooding, the highway was flooded all the way across, about 2 feet deep at the shallowest point. All the lanes had to combine down to one lane and crawl through the flood. It was deeper in other parts, and there were cameras and phones out everywhere taking pictures of a drowned car.

We finally made it through the lake, screamed "Hallelujah!" and flew along at 65mph after that. We were feeling pretty hungry by this time, so we stopped for Big Macs and imagined our soda was tea in china cups. :-)

I guess down in Texas they don't have *quite* as much corn as we do, so we got a lot of agriculture questions from Jasmine.... :-)

Finally, we were getting close. Mrs. McDonald texted Jasmine, asking how far we were. Mom said "15 minutes," but Jasmine told Mrs. McDonald 20, just to be safe. It was a good thing, because we encountered a small obstacle:

No matter what street we turned on, we hit a big dirt mountain. We decided it was time to break out the GPS phone Dad gave us for such emergencies. It didn't work.

By this time, it was just so ridiculous that we were laughing at every new problem that came up. Eventually, we found an open road and pulled in to our destination.

Jasmine told us that that morning she had been talking to a friend on the phone who asked what time she thought she'd get to the tea, to which she had replying (joking), "With my luck, 2:30!"

We pulled in at 2:30.

We were just in time for Jasmine to give her speech - and a very good one it was too!

The lovely tea tables

The young ladies of Providence made journals for every attendee!

Tara and I with Jasmine

The part of the tea that we DID get to experience was very nice and the speeches were encouraging. It was also fun catching up with our friends down there who we don't get to see as often as we'd like!

Days like that just go to show you that you may have your ideas of how you think a day will go, but sometimes, God decides to do something different. It certainly wasn't how we'd planned our day to go, and it did have its frustrations, but we had fun at the same time. We spent 6 hours in the car with Jasmine, which gave us time to get to know her, at least a little bit. We wouldn't have been able to do that if our day had gone according to plan! God's plans are always best, and we can't control how things go, so we may as well make the best of it!