blast from the past, part 1

As I have been sorting out our mess of pictures, I’ve come across some that are too good not to share, so SKH suggested that I use them in a weekly “blast from the past” post. Even though this will make two posts in a row of things that are not our children, you will certainly recognize why this picture needs to be posted for the world to see.

In the summer of 2000, Sean and I took a team of high school students from Grace Community Church to Northern Ireland on a missions trip. (Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I took them and Sean joined us two days later…once he had sorted out his passport issues with our U.S. House Representative and spent many hours alone in different airports trying to get to us.) Overall, this trip was full of difficulties and while I know we grew spiritually and did even have some fun, basically it just made us thankful that after 26 days, it ended.

One afternoon we were driving all around Northern Ireland (and actually, a significant portion of the south as well) to pick up team members from their various ministry locations. We only had one student, Shannon Roehr, with us at this point. As we were driving (in the infamous minibus) through endless miles of green, I saw a cow…and then I had one. Sean and Shannon had not seen the cow, and by the time I could coherently speak to tell Sean to turn around, we were far enough down the road that he was not really excited to go back, but he decided to humor me. We ended up having to go quite a ways down the road to the next round-a-bout (super fun intersection replacement) to turn around and then go all the way back, but I think we all thought it was well worth it.

Here is the cow that caused all the fuss…


Sick.

In the cow’s defense, she had very new twin calves, but still - that’s gross. After we took this picture, the calves got freaked out and started running away, which caused the cow to do her best to run to keep up. It did not look very comfortable at all, and I’m surprised she didn’t trip.