J and I have been on a 5 day cruise and will be returning this morning. How in the world to two people living on a stipend end up on a cruise? It all started last spring when I went to the Home and Garden show. There was a salesman there trying to get me to go on his condo time share tour. I could tell by the caliber of vacation he was offering as a reward for listening to his presentation that our income wouldn’t qualify and he was wasting his time. So, I stopped him in the middle of his sales pitch and explained that we wouldn’t qualify. Don’t waste your time. In fact, we had no income. This interested him. How does someone have no income? I explained the whole law school living off loans thing and he said, “Girl, you need a vacation.” He started marching to another booth so, like a dummy, I followed.
He was taking me to another time share sales booth but this one was for a lower-income bracket. Their normal pitch is that if you come listen to the 90 min. presentation, they will reward you with a $40 debit card for your gas and a 5 night hotel stay in Hawaii. This is good for them- hardly anyone would actually end up cashing in on the Hawaii trip as the airline tickets to get there are outside of the normal price range of those who they are preying on. BUT, as a referral from the other time share guy, we were also awarded a cruise. All we would have to pay was the $150 port taxes. Now, this was starting to sound worthwhile.
As you can imagine, J was a huge skeptic about blowing our Saturday doing this. And, it was a brutal day. The 90 min. presentation turned into 5 hours as they tried to wear us down and manipulate us into buying a time share. They leveraged our kids against us, knowing they were tired and hungry, just hoping we would give in. There was always another manager who was going to ‘check us out’ who would then give the same sell again, this time at a lower price. They even tried to get us to buy it on credit! They had us trapped because after spending so much time, we wouldn’t walk away without our reward. There were even paid plants- actors made to look like participants who would buy in and then proclaim how crazy anyone would be to not also do so.
I finally got our picnic lunch out of the car for us to eat in the middle of the presentation. I know it was rude but at that point all was fair. That’s why I wasn’t even a bit humiliated when J picked up a cherry tomato, made sure it was throughly dipped in Ranch dressing and chunked it across the table where it landed precisely on salesman # 4′s suit collar. Even as a 2-year-old, she could sense that something wasn’t right about these people.
We finally made it out of there with the Hawaii trip and the cruise. We knew we wouldn’t redeem the Hawaii trip but really wanted to redeem the cruise. At the time, J was unemployed and things weren’t looking too good. Going on a cruise while being unemployed just seemed idiotic. We were so overwhelmed that even meeting the deadlines to register seemed like a difficult task. The idea of being on a cruise seemed like it was for another lifetime. So, we named it our Faith Cruise and set the date for January. With hope and expectation, we prayed that 6 months down the road we would have something, anything to celebrate.
Once again, we are amazed by God’s provision. This is the perfect trip for just the two of us before we welcome our third child into the world. Even amidst what has continued to be a difficult year, God gives us gifts like these. I hear him say, “I’m with you. Keep pressing on.” Although we picked the date arbitrarily, it was the absolute perfect time. If we had scheduled it 8 weeks later, I would have been too far in the pregnancy to be allowed to board the ship. If we had scheduled it even 3 weeks earlier, I would have been too sick to even warrant going. It truly has turned out to be a Faith Cruise. I can guarantee one thing. There will be on one on that ship with hearts more full of gratitude than ours!
