Chapter 25- Can you hear me now??!!

Embracing a lifestyle without a set homebase or community required a lot of consideration and reflection.  Bob and I love spending time with our children, our family and friends. We both have worked in helping professions all of our lives as well as served the communities we were a part of.  For me, the decision to move aboard Meraviglia naturally led to many sleepless nights and questions of how we would maintain our important relationships with our children, our family, friends, and community.  My morning commute to Dell was where I spent time thinking and praying about how we could use this new lifestyle to continue to serve others.  What would that look like? Is it possible?  

As you may have read in earlier posts, our goal is to travel aboard Meraviglia without a set home port.  This means once she is seaworthy, leaving Brunswick and traveling wherever the winds take us.  We hope to live sustainably and not be reliant on having to be in a marina with shore power and facilities. But one of my conditions for embarking on this adventure was needing to have reliable technology to ensure consistent communication with our children and to stay connected to family and friends.  We have had some challenges at our current marina with Wi-Fi especially when stormy, but thankfully, technology has come a long way.  Things like the Garmin InReach satellite phones, better cellular service worldwide and eventually Starlink can all be tools to help.  Currently our son Nick and his girlfriend Gabby are traveling abroad with their permanent home base on the East Coast and our daughter Katharine is on the West Coast so we are already very adept at utilizing technology as a family.  LOTS of family texting (probably more than wanted LOL!) , FaceTime, and calls are already part of the norm.  The trickier part will be figuring out when and where to meet for holidays and vacations, in person.  Hopefully some will be aboard Meraviglia but we also want to see their lives and visit their locations – it would be great if at some point they at least are on the same coast!! We love spending time together as a family and will make that happen no matter where we go. Staying connected to the rest of our family and friends will be important too and again texting, FaceTime, and in person visits will hopefully help us maintain and build those relationships. It will need to be an intentional effort with dedicated time to maintain and sustain our relationships with those we love but hopefully they will feel our continued care for them. 

Serving others feels a little trickier when you are not in a set community and learning the needs and seeing how you can help. We have been fortunate while we are here in Brunswick to attend St. Athanasius Episcopal Church. It is a very small but passionate congregation led by The Rev. DeWayne Cope.  He gave a sermon last week on the Parable of the Sower.  He shared that often, when people reflect on that parable, they try to determine what kind of soil they are, hard, stony, thorny or good.  But he asked us to not only think about what kind of soil we are but how we can help sow seeds in others.  He gave some great examples of something as simple as a kind hello and opening a door for someone or giving someone a cold bottle of water on a hot day can totally change someone’s day from good to bad.  It made me reflect on our need to serve and that it does not have to look the same as we have done in the past with long, involved projects in one community but with this voyage we are in a unique position to look for ways to sow seed and serve wherever we go.  It may be serving as mentors in our professional world via technology, having a phone call with a loved one or friend who needs advice, helping a person in need at a place we visit, or simply being kind and appreciating all we are fortunate to meet. Hopefully life aboard Meraviglia will provide us with new opportunities to connect and serve ♥️