My parents are dying.
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Time flies! We have already been back in the United Kingdom for over two months.
By the time we leave England on January 4, 2023 we will have been here for five and a half months.
Since moving to the United States in 2013, we have come back to the UK on five separate occasions for a combined duration of fifteen months.
I haven’t kept a detailed record of our expenditures but by my rough estimates we have spent at least thirty-thousand dollars on our trips, and there’s every possibility it’s much higher than this.
For reasons that perhaps I’ll mention another time, I haven’t worked during those trips to England either. So adding this opportunity cost means that our trips could have cost our family upwards of eighty-thousand dollars.
Our trips, contrary to what anyone might think looking at our photographs, have never been lavish. We’ve never gone into debt to fund any of our trips. We’ve lived frugally, driven cars some would be embarrassed to drive, capitalized on our tax returns, sacrificed, worked and received great blessings from heaven.
So let me share with you the primary reason why we have spent so much money and time traveling back and forth across the Atlantic.
My parents are dying. I’m dying. We all are! It’s the terminal diagnosis we all inherited at birth.
Our culture may be obsessed with building wealth and has set it up as the cardinal pursuit of life, but when my parents depart this earth I won’t be thinking, “Gosh, I wish I had $30k in the bank”. If anything, I’ll wish I could have spent even more time with them.
And when I die it won’t matter how much is in my bank account. People always talk about leaving an inheritance for their posterity but I can’t think of a better legacy or inheritance than providing a treasure trove of memories, relationships and experiences. These things actually matter, not just now but forever.
This is what drives me to carry bags till my wrists hurt and hustle five children through busy international airports. It’s why I’ve packed and hauled every earthly possession we own to storage units many times. It’s why we’ve driven hours across state lines to find affordable flights.
In 90-days we will once again be standing at the Heathrow Airport departure gates and with tears in our eyes will hug my parents and say farewell not knowing the next time we will see them again. But it will have been worth every penny and minute to have been here.
Not everyone can visit a different country for five months, but we all could do a little better at prioritizing the people and things that matter most.
