It was two weeks of lessons. Two weeks of hustling everyone (and by everyone, I mean Alice, too) out the door at 10:45 a.m. each day for an hour plus of swimming while I baked on the sidelines in 95+ degree temps.

Did I want to do swim lessons? No, I did not. Was it a good thing— the best thing— to do them? Yes. It clearly was.

The Fab Five rocked their swim lessons. But this isn’t actually a post about my kids and their swimming prowess.

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It’s a post about community and encouragement and all the things you can see God doing in the world if you just stop and look.

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The kind people who went out of their way to tell me that my kids were exceptionally welcoming, or polite.

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The opportunities I had to interact with mothers I’d never have met otherwise.

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The chances we all had to share the Gospel in words and in deed right here, to our neighbors.

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My husband is currently across an ocean, living out his call to train and equip believers to evangelize their own people. And we are here, offering to pray with a pregnant woman whose morning sickness doesn’t seem to know it’s supposed to stay in the morning, asking the shy 7 year-old if he’d like a turn diving for the sinking sharks, giving the elderly lady a bottle of water from our bag so she doesn’t have to keep getting up to make her way to the water fountains.

Small things, but things I admit I had forgotten were so sweet until God reminded me. Gently. Graciously. While I was sweating it out at the side of a public pool.