A Weekend in New Jersey: Another Lesson on Choosing to Laugh

I wrote recently about the night my son and I spent on I-95.   My husband and I just had an entire weekend like that in New Jersey.We were near Newark for a special wedding Steve was officiating at. It was a beautiful Korean-American wedding, attended by lots of young men and women. And we had a sweet time with long-time friends, the parents of the bride.But getting from place to place was an adventure.Upon arrival in Newark, we searched for directions to rental cars. We found no such information. We kept asking, until our 5th inquiry gave us the truth: We needed to take the AirTrain to the rental car facility.Finally success! We arrived at National, got our car and headed out from the airport, with our Iphone Map and directions from the rental car attendant.Almost immediately we were off the highlighted route, but were able to switch to Route 2. Next thing we knew we were on the NJ Turnpike headed for the Lincoln Tunnel. We managed to get back on Route 2, but lack of clear signs and our consequent corrections turned a 20-minute trip into an hour.We laughed and thanked God we had made it to the hotel with plenty of time to get ready for the wedding. Detailed directions from mycomputer got us to the church and to the reception without incident, driving through beautiful woods and across wide rivers.  But I had forgotten to get those same details for our trip from the reception back to the hotel.Late at night, we wandered north of Newark as roads suddenly had different names.  Indicated turns were not there.  And when we finally came to NJ 17, we could find only South entrances and we needed to go North. A few quick prayers and some intuition and we were finally on the right road.Again, we laughed and thanked God that we would have a good story.Final installment. We made it easily to the airport the next morning, comfortable that we knew how to take the AirTrain back to the airport. Only the AirTrain was shut down. We, along with more than 50 anxious passengers, waited for two shuttle buses that finally came and delivered us to our terminals.Life is filled with wrong turns, lack of needed information, misleading directions, unexpected events. And sometimes really bad choices or devastating outcomes. My natural response is to whine a little (or a lot), to express how I think it should be done, to fret, to grumble, to occasionally become angry.So I love it when I can keep laughing and thanking God. Which I mostly did during our weekend in New Jersey.What about you: Have you been able to laugh when things go wrong?C2012 Judy Douglass