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The Moments We’ll Remember
3200 feet of climbing high into the Big Belt Mountain Range near Townsend Montana I’m struck by the thought above.
We went on a big mountain bike ride that turned out to be an all day adventure.
I’ll get to that in a minute.
As we’re riding along I said to Kathy, you know these are the moments we’re going to remember when we’re in our eighties.
We won’t care about the business clients that walked away, we won’t spend time thinking about deals that didn’t work out or even the little fights we had on some of the rocky days of our marriage.
What we are going to remember is this….
The ride is up Duck Creek Gulch. I hope you can see what I’m talking about in these pictures I took from on top.
It’s a tough ride but so much beauty and when you get to the top you can see the entire valley.
We ran into wood cutters, huckleberry pickers and plenty of ATV riders using the backroad to get from Townsend to White Sulfur Springs by way of the rough road over the rocky mountain pass.
We got bitten by hundreds of pesky horse flies. The weather was perfect but our day was not.
As we headed down the trail I hit a rut and when head over heels. I was fine, a little achy this morning, but got back on my bike and continued down. We have these really cool phone holding devices on our bikes that are amazing. When I fell my phone fell off so I quickly put it back on. Apparently I didn’t do it quite right because three miles or so down the hill I looked and my phone was gone.
I panicked.
Kathy was ahead of me and didn’t see what had happened. I thought about heading back up the hill on my bike to find it but I remembered how much climbing that was and thought it best to go back down to the truck and head back up with some horsepower.
We were both frustrated. This was not how the day was supposed to go.
We drove up to where I had fallen and I went down on my bike, she drove the truck and we surveyed every inched of the road and roadside.
We were about a half a mile from where I had noticed the phone missing when Kathy said, “we’re never gonna find it.”
Oh, I didn’t tell you we wasted about 45 minutes on the mountain talking with AppleCare trying to figure out why “find my phone” wasn’t working.
Most of the time when I get a few feet from my phone my apple watch, which I had on, will alert me. Nothing.
That was a big waste of time.
Anyway, back down the hill, we had about half a mile to the location where I noticed my phone missing and I said to Kathy “I just need to look until I get to that place or I’ll always wonder if I missed it.”
Not more than a few hundred yards from there I saw my phone sitting in a ditch below the surface of the road, protected from the many ATV’s and trucks that travel this backroad.
Looking back I felt like I knew God had this one for me. I was losing hope but in the end He came through. I’d like to tell you I was overjoyed but instead spent much of the ride home mentally beating myself up for being so stupid.
The phone is fine.
The screen protector did its job but lost its life. LOL
Our day was changed and our conversation on the way home was filled with….If only we had looked there first….I should have checked my phone holder…..you know, the stuff that gets you nowhere but more frustrated.
I know you shouldn’t do that but we’re human and frailty comes with the territory.
I wish I was a person who trusted God more. I wish I didn’t get so upset when things don’t go well. I’m not a very good “roll off your back” kind of guy.
I’m in process.
But hey, when it comes to living life and finding interesting stories full of adventure, my failures seem to be my best asset.
I can laugh and realize when I spoke those words about remembering this moment, God sealed the story with my phone mishap.
This is truly one of those moments we will remember when we need a good story to tell when we’re in our eighties.
What right now feels like a wasted day, in 20 years will be a tear rolling down our faces as we remember what an amazing life we had together.
And one of us, will get to tell that story at the others memorial service.
God is good.
Remember, it’s all about the story of our lives and the bad moments are most memorable.
